Free Republic

For 40 years, Lucy Calkins dominated literacy instruction in much of the country and especially New York City. She built an empire both intellectual and financial. In the past year, Teachers College in Columbia University tossed Lucy and her Reading and Writing Project out on the sidewalk. According to The New Yorker, there was a problem, especially in New York City: "literacy rates remain dismal." Uh-oh. The big question is, how can a person who got everything wrong be the brains of a world-famous education juggernaut? Calkins was an elementary school teacher — not an original thinker, but probably well...

Illiteracy is a serious and growing problem in the United States: 21% of adults were illiterate in 2022, and 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level. Illiteracy traps people (and nations) in poverty. This, despite the fact that the United States spends more money on primary and secondary education than any other industrial nation. One of the main reasons our literacy skills are so abysmal is the rejection of traditional phonics-based pedagogy in favor of trendier, "ground-breaking" or "leading edge" methodologies pushed by prominent schools of education at prestigious universities. Educational fads pushed by highly credentialed advocates and...

Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states. The turnaround in these three states has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates. The states have passed laws adopting similar reforms that emphasize phonics and early screenings for struggling kids.

Members of the UNC Board of Governors are not happy. A years-long effort to align teacher training with the best scientifically proven methods to teach reading has fallen flat on its face. Given the grim state of literacy in the state, a January report outlining UNC-System schools’ failures is particularly egregious. According to a recent third-party review of UNC educator preparation programs (EPPs), only UNC Charlotte’s EPP is properly grounding teachers in research-based literacy instruction methods, also known as the “science of reading.” The skills addressed in that science include phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and...

230,000 children who failed to show up for class when public schools reopened after the pandemic. It’s a tragedy without parallel in American history as many of the no-shows are very young — K through 3rd grade. Critical skills learned in early education were not taught to these kids, who are now hopelessly behind. ... Consider the fact that 65% of American fourth-grade students can barely read. This is a result of a radical shift to a new way of teaching children how to read. What was wrong with the old way? Well, it was old. ... What exactly are...

For much of his life, Roderick, a high school junior, did not enjoy reading...But recently, he said, he has made strides, in part because of an unusual and sweeping high school literacy curriculum in Memphis... The program focuses on expanding vocabulary and giving teenagers reading strategies - such as decoding words - that build upon fundamentals taught in elementary school. The curriculum is embedded not just in English, but also in math, science and social studies... The program in Memphis is an extension of a growing national movement to change the way younger children are taught to read, based on...

Commentary: Why Johnny can’t read — 100 years of teaching without phonics Minnesota reading scores will remain dismal, and the gap between African Americans and Latinos and whites will persist, until our schools adopt systematic pure phonics to teach our children to read. The Minnesota Department of Education just released test scores for 2022. More than 50% of Minnesota third-graders didn’t pass the state reading test. Over 70% of African-American third-graders didn’t pass. Eighty-five percent of African-American third-graders in Minneapolis Public Schools didn’t pass. How did this happen? Because a majority of our schools still do not truly embrace systematic...

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.” The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as...

Why would a country undermine phonics? One of the most startling queries I ever received came from a teacher in Israel. Here is the entire communication: I watched some of your youtube videos with thirst and feel the frustration that I feel when I tutor private elementary students, who come without any clue as to how to read English, as if for 5-6 years all they had done was filling workbooks and learning word lists. Older students keep telling me their teachers insist on guessing from texts and looking for clues when words are unknown, and they fear to use...

If our irresponsible media would do its job, if our politicians and community leaders would be more involved in ending the great national embarrassment, if parents would understand what's going on in the classroom and become so angry they won't take it anymore, we could have better schools in no time. Here is a dirty little secret that deserves your consideration. Most of the problems in the public school are caused by deliberate human actions. Not innocent human error as when somebody pushes the wrong button. No; think of the situation where somebody cuts a plane’s fuel line.George Soros said...

Cursive has been controversial for years. The striking thing is that the Education Establishment feels really, really strongly about cursive. They hate it! But why are they so emotional? One professor of education stated emphatically: "Teaching cursive handwriting is an outdated waste of time." A second professor of education, quoted in the New York Times, was equally dogmatic: "Districts and states should not mandate the teaching of cursive. Cursive should be allowed to die." You are hearing the imperious voice of an impatient Education Establishment. They do not want to discuss pros and cons. They want to have a funeral...

Sad to say, the Reading Wars continue in the USA. Millions of children are made to memorize sight-words, a proven road to illiteracy. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites, continue to assert things that are the opposite of truth. For example, we are told that English isn’t a phonetic language and students have no choice but to memorize the vast English language one sight-word at a time. Nonsense, as Rudolf Flesch famously explained in his 1955 bestseller "Why Johnny Can't Read.” Why does this destructive charade go on? The official experts continue to disorient the public with incorrect theories, fake research,...

Looking away from sinister Jeffrey Epstein and horrific truth’s easy, but denial is dangerous, like the malfeasance within public schools, doesn’t just go away. People Don’t Want to Know the Truth, Even When it’s Undeniable Lionel Nation, a lawyer and radio host, argues that Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are so staggeringly repulsive that most people won’t be able to deal with them. Better to look away. (Nation speculated in August that this aversion may save Epstein. Now that Epstein is officially dead, this aversion may save his friends and accomplices.)In a video, Lionel Nation explains the power of extreme evil. Most...

Important Ed News /// Phonics is winning, finally, at long last, after 85 stupid years, after 50 million functional illiterates, after one of the most stubborn subversive schemes against common sense ever to brutalize a country. Finally, the one correct way to teach reading is again embraced as the one correct way to teach reading. Go ahead, shout "OMG." The fix has been in for so many dumbed down decades that many people may have given up hope. You may think this is now crazy optimism on my part. But I will show you some signs that things have suddenly...

August 2017, Charlottesville: Police disappear even as belligerents advance toward each other, and fighting in the streets begins. The same tactic had been used successfully in Ferguson and Baltimore. Who but President Obama and the respective governors could have given the orders to stand down? Who else but mayors and police chiefs could have expedited such counterintuitive commands? Democrats got their optics. CNN could chant each day that the USA is full of white nationalists and right-wing criminality. Obama must've been proud. Anyone could see that white supremacists lurked on every street. Funny thing: If you wait around for these...

The most striking thing about our public schools is that they have been in perpetual decline for many decades. Why? The government has its own tests called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); these tests regularly suggest that two-thirds of fourth-graders and eighth-graders are "below proficient" in reading. That's what decline looks like. It's guaranteed those two-thirds will never be literate, as that term has been traditionally used. Some may learn to read in a painful struggling way, but they won't be reading a daily paper or curling up with a good book. And yet, a century ago, this...

>>>>I've been told that Siegfried Englemann (born 1931) passed away. We lost one of our greats. Anything this man said, you can take it to the bank. I did this email interview two years ago and tried to cover his main interests:<<<<< Siegfried Engelmann is the real thing, an educator who loves to teach children and knows how to do it, both personally and in his books. As far back as the late 1960s, he told the Education Establishment: you’re doing it all wrong. Engelmann takes a scientific approach. He believes you formulate programs, test them, revise them, and keep...

(More about reading): The biggest promises in K-12 involve reading and sight-words. Children are told: Learn your sight-words and you will be good readers! There is a strange tautology in sight-word instruction. When you learn to be a successful reader, you will be a successful reader. That's the weird boilerplate found throughout K-12. Suppose you tell a bunch of six-year-olds that tight-rope walking is easy. Put one foot in front of the other; don’t look down; smile confidently and walk. Children, you stress, cannot enjoy fun on the high wire until they have learned to walk comfortably on the high...

Sue Dickson is best known as the creator of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, one of the most popular phonics programs. Now in her 80s, she is still active as ever, pushing phonics however possible, and refining a new approach. The ups-and-downs in her career tell us a lot about the sad state of American education. In her college’s pre-teacher program, she was taught nothing about phonics. Not only that, when she started to teach first-grade, her superiors constantly emphasized their verdict that phonics is useless and even dangerous. Sue Dickson recalls: “I was told that phonics doesn’t work, that...

A real OMG moment occurred last week when the New York Times awoke from a long sleep and published the truth about reading. Yes, it’s true. The New York Times came right out and told the world that if you want children to learn to read, they need phonics. No ifs, ands, or buts. No weird digressions into context and balanced this-or-that. No claims that people can learn to read simply by picking up a good book and reading. The article is titled “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?” Why, indeed? Here’s the gist of it: “First...