Posted on 09/27/2023 3:58:00 PM PDT by CFW
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 intentioned. Nonetheless, she appropriated the wrong-headed clichés created by the Education Establishment during the last 90 years. One popular gimmick assumes falsely that children are natural readers: just put a book in their hands. In sum, she concocted yet another version of Whole Word, which Progressive educators put into play starting in 1930. Rudolf Flesch explained it all in his 1955 book Why Johnny Can't Read — namely, the schools refused to teach phonics and instead made Johnny memorize Whole Words, AKA sight-words. Literacy rates became dismal.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Not true. Have to work the darn problems. We never used flash cards and everyone learned arithmetic just fine. Diff Eq won’t surrender to your flash cards either does calculus. Have your children learn to count change. That works just fine
I can understand the desire to make money off selling new textbooks and teaching materials, and for building careers aound promoting a “new” system every few years.
But why is it that “educators” return, again and again, to versions of the failed “whole language” concept? Years of dismal results across multiple iterations of the program is plenty of evidence that “whole language” does not work for most children learning to read in English (and languages written in Roman or Greeek characters), while phonics has been proven to work reliably for most.
Is there a Marxist angle, or some other ideological imperative driving this in Schools of Education? Is it sometimes a tool for racial levelling? This is harsh, but I could see leftist educrats using whole language to produce “equity of results” to render both “minority” and white children equally illiterate, crippling their ability to absorb any subject matter. Maybe it’s intended to fail.
English is a phonetic language and yet the educational establishment insists on teaching it by word memory like it was Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Phonics works well for teaching kids to read, while the other methods produce poor results.
English is a phonetic language and yet the educational establishment insists on teaching it by word memory like it was Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Phonics works well for teaching kids to read, while the other methods produce poor results.
Sounds like a good woman. You were blessed to have her.
Phonics simply works. If one wants to get out of the classroom and land a comfy seat on the gray train one must come up with a new secret sauce to do what phonics already does.
The Calkins-crap is known as See/Say and a bunch of other terms. It simply doesn’t work. Phonics allows one to sound out new words whereas See/Say doesn’t. If one wanted to control the spread of information and limit what one can read about, See/Say is your ticket.
The following episode shows the A-B-C approach. It starts at about 16:00 in my browser but I like the whole episode. Some of the actors also appeared on Phil Silvers's show about Bilko.
Yes, ideological imperative is exactly what we’re up against.
You might like seeing podcast LET’S FIX EDUCATION episodes 116 and 117, both written as I was finishing the Lucy article.
It’s wonderful to see so many people agreeing on phonics. I’ve been placing education articles on Free Republic for years and usually there’s a gang of sight-word people criticizing me. If kids are started off on sight-words for a few years, they really are damaged.
A great story. I think I’ll ask you to write me a longer version so more people can see it.
We need more people fighting guerilla wars against bad instruction.
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