Posted on 02/13/2023 1:31:37 PM PST by JSM_Liberty
A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit.
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.
Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.
One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.
“Too much reading instruction is not based on what the evidence says,” noted Nancy Madden, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who is an expert on early literacy. “That’s pretty clear.
“At least half of kids in the U.S. are not getting effective reading instruction.”
Other experts agree. Ted Mitchell, an education veteran at nearly every level who is now president of the American Council on Education, thinks that easily a majority of children are getting subpar instruction.
Others disagree, of course. But an approach called the “science of reading” has gained ground, and it rests on a bed of phonics instruction...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This is how we used to teach reading. And is why we were much better at teaching it than today. But they're expressing it like it's some new and innovative "science of reading" approach. They are basically trying real hard not to admit they were wrong in changing how to teach reading.
Wut?
The NY Times knows something is wrong but wants to fix it by doing the same old crap that failed in the first place.
Want to fix it - get the Federal government out of education, nuke the teachers unions, stop teaching 72 genders, CRT, and all the other woke BS currently being foisted on our children.
Teach reading, writing, and arithmetic plus add in classes like personal finance, taxes, and basic skills like how to use hammer/screwdriver/etc.
No more ology classes except biology - and teach it according to science and not leftwing perverted groomology.
And maybe toss in a class on the true history of the Democratic party to boot.
Just wondering in the “Science of Reading” is just another renamed sight reading program that claims to have a phonics foundation.
That’s what the education publishers do. Rename their garbage materials and claim this time they really are superior , teach phonics and will have the chilfren raeding at grade leve in mere months for the low cost of just $$$$ per student.
But wait! There’s more! Education publishing is full of ShanWow artists with a PhD in Education on their name tag.
Well, that is so 1960s and probably racist as well.
When I was a pup back in grade 4, even the slackards read a book a week outside class. Average kids read two and some of us (including me), read three or more.
We had a black kid in the class who was in the three or more group. I remember him well, not because he was black, but because he wore a white shirt and tie to class. He told us his parents expected it and, yeah, he had two of them. This was 1964, Topeka, Kansas.
Dr. Seuss.
L
So now they admit we were right! We conservatives were told we were just old-fashioned and backwards when we said the “sight-reading” method of guessing would not work. An entire generation is now entering the work-force without the ability to read simple instructions. And the ones coming up behind them will also graduate with those deficiencies. And we have teachers that did not learn phonics so will struggle to pass that method on to the students.
In addition, students have missed the enjoyment that the wonderful journey of following a figure of history through their life, or the magic of a good novel on a rainy and lazy day. What a waste!
Can we now return to phonics as the preferred method of teaching a child how to read?
I remember my father reading Curious George with/to me when I was a young child. This was probably why I have never had any issues reading.
Hard to believe, I grew up in California schools. I, along with most of my 6th grade class, tested at 12th grade reading level. As a class, we read books like Animal Farm and the Count of Monte Cristo. A favorite of mine for nearly 60 years.
It isn’t rocket science...
1. Phonics
2. Tough standards
3. Expect kids to earn grades
4. Meritocracy
But NONE of those things will be used because, you know, “equity.”
They are rapidly achieving equity because soon nobody will be able to read.
Retired teacher & saw this all the time. Everything is renamed, rebooted, & nothing good comes out of it. Well yes something does: a whole lot of the school district’s money to, as you brilliantly put it, “the sham wow” grifters. The only difference is that the as seen on tv stuff usually works & does what it states.
The grifter market in education is HUGE! We always wondered what goodies the administration got for adapting yet another soon to be forgotten scam.
My phonics education base was so strong I can often sound out foreign words. I may not know what they mean, but I can sure break them down ; )
My wife was a teacher for nearly 30 years and every couple of years a new reading, or math program would be tried. It was a disaster. Kids did not learn anything except being confused. Nothing was congruent.
This has finally come to a head and failure is slowly being admitted.
now Now...
Emily Hanford became famous over the last several years for talking constantly about the Science of Reading. That’s where children learn to read in the simplest, most efficient way and go on to enjoy many hundreds of books. Long story short, what she means by the Science of Reading is phonics — nothing less, nothing else.
The problem is that the left in our country forced phonics into oblivion starting in 1931. So what was going on for those 90 years from 1931 to now? A titanic and quite stupid con, that’s what.
Basically, the professors of education at Harvard and such places identified and codified the things that work — and then (this is my summary) they made sure that none of those things are allowed in the schools. Only methods known not to work are praised in our classrooms. The simplest, most appropriate name for this approach is the Science of Illiteracy.
Sometimes the impression is given that these professors drifted around from one method to another. That’s actually not true. They have only one method — but it has many names (such as sight-words and Whole Word) — and they are content to hide inside the confusion they create.
Reading consists of learning two things: letters and sounds. If you’re not focusing on letters and sounds, you don’t have phonetic instruction of a phonetic language.
Note how precise the pseudo-reading program is. You get rid of letters and sounds. You don’t mention an alphabet, and you don’t teach children what the alphabet represents. The Science of Illiteracy is really easy. You just leave out the valuable parts and let kids struggle.
One of the oddest spectacles you’ll ever see is the top brains in American education all agreeing that the alphabet serves no useful purpose. How do you find fanatics like this?
These professors were monolithic; each one parroted the wisdom of the others. Each one finds a slightly different way of making the same dubious claims. Notice the smug, Olympian tone.
“Current practice in the teaching of reading does not require a knowledge of the letters,” says Dr. Donald D. Darrell.
“The skillful teacher will be reluctant to use any phonetic method with all children,” says Dr. Paul Witty.
Dr. Roma Gans tells it simply and starkly: “In recent years phonetic analysis of words at any level of the reading program fell into disrepute.”
“Little is gained by teaching the child sounds and letters as a first step to reading. More rapid results are generally obtained by the direct method of simply showing the word to the child and telling him what it is.” Thus spake Anderson and Dearborn.
“The words should be recognized as whole words. It is detrimental indeed to have the children spell or sound out the words at this stage.” That’s Bond and Wagner.
We have to thank Rudolf Flesch for creating a time capsule circa 1940 in the first chapter of his famous book Why Johnny Can’t Read. He quotes all the schemers shaping our culture. A dozen of these people took children down the wrong path so they would become victims of the Science of Illiteracy.
The success of Flesch’s book in 1955 was the first sign of resistance by ordinary citizens. The Education Establishment didn’t wait six months before it set up the counter-group known as the International Reading Association. This was a massive organization intended to keep teachers and parents in line. It succeeded to a tragic degree.
How do the professors refer to their voodoo reading? In the most respectful terms, as if Einstein had written it out for them. On the other hand, Rudolf Flesch complained that teaching children to read English with sight-words means eliminating 4,000 years of progress, as we moved from difficult symbol languages (such as Egyptian hieroglyphics) to more efficient ways to let great masses of people read their language.
Nineteen thirty-one was the beginning of the end of our school system. Yes, 1931. That’s when the education professors pushed phonics out of the public schools and imposed a sham method that virtually guaranteed that most students would become functional illiterates, evidently the goal of the Science of Illiteracy.
This power-grab in 1931 was historically remarkable. The Depression had just started. The country was nervous and unstable. The professors thought they had enough leverage to pull off a coup, almost as ambitious as the attack on Pearl Harbor but with even greater ramifications for the future.
I wouldn’t be surprised if all these professors quoted by Flesch were members of the Communist Party (AKA the Communist International). They were clearly in control of K–12 education in America. All they had to do was befuddle and outwit the public.
Money was a big factor. All the top professors made millions by creating a series of little books often referred to as Dick and Jane basal readers.
Please remember that Dr. Samuel Orton did a famous study in 1928 that determined that sight-words would mess up a child’s brain. Education professors had to pretend for decades that they believed in a method that they knew was fake. Their deception ushered in the Science of Illiteracy.
Throughout this saga, the Education Establishment bullied recklessly as they announced their visions, denounced all research that didn’t support their chicanery, and forced the children and parents to accept their Science of Illiteracy.
We see this reckless swagger now in the way the Democrats try to control government the same way they control education. Americans can learn so much about weaknesses in our democracy by studying K–12. Our ideals break down quickly when ruthless people break all the rules.
We can easily save the public schools, but only if we adhere to the Science of Reading. Here’s a four-minute version of that.
My last post & then I’ll stop for awhile 😜. Many, if not most of us, were brought up being read to, reading to others, going to the library to pick out books.....making us love & enjoy reading. As a retired teacher I saw way too many kids whose parent (s) were not readers & NO reading was fostered at home. Combine that with some almost non existent parenting & voila...no reading skills & no seed planted to become a reader. Those instances were always heartbreaking.
One thing to remember is that phonics don’t sound the same when spoken with ebonics.
It’s very easy for children to learn to read.
Age 1-3, a child can learn to read and spell words.
By 5 or 6, a child can read chapter books. (One of mine could read my old college textbooks at age 4. I had to watch what he got his hands on.)
Some kids might delay reading until later, but they catch up and move ahead when they’re ready.
My children never went to school until college. School is the reason some kids can’t read well.
A child should enjoy reading. Schools teach that reading is homework.
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