14,000 positive reviews.
Worked on every kid I ever taught reading (English). Bi-lingual kids too. As early as 4 years old. In miracle time.
Recommended to me by an old teacher, who said “they stopped teaching it, I have been trying to tell parents to get this book, the school system is hurting children.”
Nope. A huge chunk of the country switched to teaching kids to guess from pictures, because adults don't like the sound of kids sounding out words, and the folks selling that idea had some pretty slick marketing.
A whole bunch of school districts are juuuuuust now figuring out it was a dumb idea and replacing it.
Kids are born highly variable and the English language is wildly inconsistent, even more so in written form. I'm not advocating some "learning styles" nonsense, but I don't see why certain subjects can't or shouldn't be taught more than one way to provide a more robust mental toolbox for students, while also increasing the odds that something initially clicks for them. This obsession and politicization of teaching the "one true way" is causing kids to get left behind.
The reasons for why the star changes are three part .
1. Lucy Calkins feel free to google her . (clarifying she is pedaling a bullshit program that for many years promoted anti-phonics. People bought into it as it was new and from Columbia university. So it must be good.)
2. Lucy Calkins Runs Columbia’s Teachers College to some extent. Combined with the bias that Columbia’s program must be better then anything else ever , because it’s “Columbia” and “ if you were this smart you would have gone here !”
3. Local school districts in NY State operate as defacto municipal governments. Orton Gillingham / science based literacy programs are not promoted as they are A. Thought of as not fast to teach and there for will cause added expense . B. The teachers who get trained and certified are not incentivized to stay employed where they were trained. They use it as way to make more money . C. Outside firms who provide OG based services to school districts ( Wilson , Spire etc ) tend to a charge the schools a lot . Remember in NY it’s not the state taxes paying for it but local residents. D. Teacher bias that only “ ADHD , Poor , Minorities ,Non Native Speakers etc etc “ students can’t learn to read .
So while NYC is leading the way the rest of the state needs to follow suit. To be fair many other states are failing for similar reasons. Florida state has a free OG based reading program . IIRC it’s 2-Clause BSD licensed .
Yeah sorry I should have been clearer. But you are right people finally realized she was peddling total bullshit . Her programs were including teaching practices like “skippy the frog” teaching kids to not sound out or use phonics , but to just skip the words you can’t read . She also pushed the idea that OG based programs were bad compared to hers . Her status as a Columbia prof convinced people she had good ideas .
All the library funding in the world won’t help if you don’t teach the kids to read in the first place. That’s either done with phonics, or with abysmal failure rates.
There is a genuinely held belief among many educators that if, instead of making children do boring repetetive things like decoding and chanting syllables (or learning times tables), teachers just took a step back and let childrens' magical inner light shine, they would pick up the skills they need as they go along and be much happier on top of that. For more details on this, and the people and companies involved in the phonics situation specifically, I can recommend the free podcast "sold a story" [1] (or its transcript, if you learnt to read back when phonics were in fashion).
The tragedy here is that people were genuinely trying to do good, followed an approach that felt compassionate and humane, and there were even a couple of small studies backing them up. And there are a minority of children (more often than not from well-to-do households) who do indeed pick up reading without any formal instruction in phonics; trying to replicate their experience for everyone else too seems like a virtuous project. The problem is that, according to a lot of substantial scientific research, this no-phonics approach simply does not work for a majority of children, and leaves them functionally illiterate - that or your parents, if they notice and afford it, hire a private reading tutor so the effect of no-phonics reading instruction in schools is actually to widen rather than narrow demographic gaps in reading.
This is an endemic problem across all of the education system, in the UK as well.
There is a school in London that eschews modern teaching (no group work, etc. teacher is the authority). It gets great results but is a pariah as it subscribes to no modern education doctrine:
I think education should be treated like medicine: Do the conservative thing that has been proven to work. And if you've got some new brilliant idea on how to improve things run studies and trials before you unleash your "feelgood and humane approach" on defenseless children.
Education feels like a test laboratory where every (sorry) idiot can bullshit people into doing insane things solely based on emotions and a handful (of probably useless) studies.
The tragedy with phonics in particular is that we have the kind of evidence in favour that comes close to medical standards of "proven to work" - at least a lot better than the alternative - and some states or schools are still going "meh".
> The tragedy here is that people were genuinely trying to do good, followed an approach that felt compassionate and humane
I don’t think this assigns sufficient fault to the teachers. Being insufficiently skeptical of newfangled approaches to something fundamental like how to teach kids to read is blameworthy.
Personally, I would say there's a lot of blame to go around but around 0% of that should fall on the median teacher. In a lot of places, teachers' jobs are in practice to keep up with implementing the endless flood of initiatives and programmes and innovations meant to make things better, often written by people who have no clue. The median teacher will discover quite soon that any criticism of the latest guidelines coming down from above is not welcome.
It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors.
In the UK, a case recently made the headlines where a head teacher ended their own life after Ofsted (the government's office for education) downgraded their school's rating. Schools are in the game of guessing what they think Ofsted will like as much as some students are in the game of guessing what they think their teacher will like to read in their essay to get an A, and it certainly seems like schools demonstrating enthusiasm in implementing the latest Ofsted initiatives is part of the whole circus. The median teacher is on the receiving end of both the government's initiatives and their head teacher's ideas on how to implement them; if they use whole-language instruction because that's what Big Brother has made this week's doctrine then I'd allocate the blame 100% to the people with actual structural power in this situation.
(There is a whole book on this, Teach Like Nobody's Watching by Mark Enser, trying to encourage teachers to go outside the box of "what will look good on the next Ofsted inspection" where they are given the leeway to do this by their head teachers.)
Although phonics has many studies behind it showing that it works better than whole-language, to the extent that I strongly support teaching phonics, you'll note that part of the original topic title is "NY is Forcing Schools to ...". That's how orders come down to teachers in the real world, so it seems unfair to blame teachers too much for the results.
> It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors.
I would actually make a more grounded analogy.
Let's pretend for a moment there exists some very large, well-studied and scientifically-valid body of research which says object-oriented programming is unequivocally bad. Programmers who follow object-oriented development practices are invariably less productive and create more security vulnerabilities. While these findings have been well-known to computer science researchers for decades, they have been unilaterally ignored by the technology industry, which continues to use languages such as Java and C++. Software engineers with experience in object-oriented development are paid higher salaries. Object-oriented programming continues to be taught at colleges and universities.
Eventually, the research about OO hits the mainstream press. Experts calculate OO is responsible for a zillion additional ransomware attacks per year, leading to numerous deaths at hospitals around the world.
Would you hold individual programmers responsible for using object-oriented programming?
You can replace OO with whatever holy war topic you prefer. Memory safety. Strict typing. React. Electron. POSIX. Serverless. Scrum. In at least one case, it's probably true.
For anyone wanting even more background and context, I recommend Kieran Egan's "The educated mind" which argues among other things that there are three, not just two, conflicting paradigms behind schooling - not just the academic/developmental conflict of which phonics vs whole-language is an example, but also the third paradigm of socialisation. You might or might not agree with Egan's conclusions, but his background and context is properly researched. However, be warned that he is not exactly the most readable author out there, to put it mildly.
Some students still struggle to learn reading in a phonics-based reading environment. Teachers or those with influence over the curriculum get sold on some other program that they are told is going to make things better, and it might for a few students, but as explained here, it’s not evidence-based that it’s going to be better for everyone.
A friend of mine lives in a well off school district that adopted a non-phonics approach. Her child was falling behind in reading, so she had to teach her phonics at home and then she caught up. She wasn’t happy that she had to do the school’s job for them.
To put a rough guess on some numbers, with a phonics-based program I reckon you will get something like 80-90% of kids to read, with a "whole language" one, about 30% at best (though some more kids will end up reading because their parents hire a private phonics tutor, or do what your friend did).
Kids with dyslexia or other disabilities affecting reading will need special help (this includes the case of kids who simply need glasses so they can see the letters properly!), and for some severely intellectually disabled kids, they may never be able to read.
One of the promises of "Reading Recovery" (the non-phonics based approach) was that it would help the 10-20% who were still struggling despite phonics at school, and if it had done that it would have been worth celebrating. The problem is that switching to that approach in schools actually massively reduced the proportion of proficient readers.
It's really frustrating when your kid goes to a place all day where their most important job, by far, is to teach the kid to read, and they fail to do it, and you have to pick up the pieces.
A parent who has the time, energy, and skill to teach their child to read after work is blessed. Same goes for the kid - sometimes kids come home tired after school and don't want to be subjected to more learning activities!
I say this as a parent who has spent a lot of energy teaching both of my kids to read. The younger one has been much harder than the other. And I am just praying that what the school is doing is working, because it's a struggle to get her to spend even more time sitting and focused on page after page of black and white.
I've seen some of the school materials and they are phonics-based, so I think it's on the right track, but a lot depends on the teacher. A couple months ago I went to a parent teacher conference for her where the teacher talked as if she could be sure the little one would be fine, because she'd taught her brother who got concepts very quickly. And I had to explain that actually no, the little one isn't the same, she isn't anywhere near where her brother was at that age, and I laid out the specifics. I did manage to get the teacher to make a bit of a surprised face and take some notes about it.
People sometimes romanticize the experience of having children too much. In reality it can be a struggle with no assurance that things are going to be okay. And the guilt of leaving your child struggling with an essential life skill feels like sinking to the bottom of the ocean. My little one is currently very young but if she continues to lag, who knows what I will do? I might have to destroy my work schedule to home school her. I love my job and it brings in truckloads of money for the family, but am I going to spend all my time on that and let my kid be failed by the people I pay to help her? Not a chance.
Is calling out parents who apparently fell for the "we will care for your child, so you can go to work and dont be bothered" meme really so bizarre? I disagree. It is actually high time to do this more!
If your friend thought that the school was solely responsible for their child's education, that's more on them than the school. Every child is going to have areas they struggle in, and parents are responsible for their children 24/7, not just 6-8 hours per day like the schools.
Parents will be reluctant to interfere in their kids' education; if I had taught my kids to do arithmetic the way I was taught it, they would have become confused, because their schools were using techniques that on the surface looked different. And the jargon was different too.
Perhaps not so much with reading. But with reading, parents don't really need to get into all the pedagogy; just reading to and with your kids will help a lot.
While I agree with your overall point, this case is different. They were teaching a bad method. I highly recommend listening to the free podcast "Sold on a Story," which covers how teaching a non-evidence-based method became the trendy way to teach reading in many schools. A good portion of kids will learn to read regardless of the method. As for the kids who the system failed, many parents had to hire private lessons (who taught phonics) or had to learn how to teach them themselves.
Sure. And I struggle with this balance myself as a parent. But schools do have some very strong responsibility in education - otherwise why are we giving them prime 8 to 12 to 16 years of our lives? And we pay them and kids spend more time with them than with us (we do not contrary to your post have 168hrs a week with them! Kids go to school and play with their friends and sleep and do other activities. School is by far the biggest chunk of their time pie graph!) .
When viewed from that perspective our expectations should be high, while not dismissing our our part as parents and supporters of the school. I don't like the north American attitude toward teachers, but i disagree we should not absolve education system of basic education responsibilities.
Well she did what a responsible parent should do, what's your point? That she shouldn't mind the school struggles to teach basic reading in the year 2023?
It looks like based on the article it was more like schools had more flexibility in choosing how they would teach their students to read, and individual schools chose to drop phonics. This change would force schools to choose from a select set of teaching materials, all of which would include phonics. (But, if the school already has a literacy rate above a certain threshold, they can apply to be exempt).
The problem with the "don't actually try to read; instead, guess what the word might be based on things other than the actual letters it's actually composed of" approach is... it doesn't teach kids to read.
It does, however, teach kids to skim and guess and parrot, which, given a bit of coaching and upfront memorisation, is perfectly sufficient for passing a literacy test by rote despite, in fact, being unable to actually read.
So we end up with perverse incentives for the school and kids with unfortunate gaps in their life skills.
> Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words.
Yes, as you become a better reading, the individual letters don't really matter anymore, as it starts being parsed without effort. It is NOT, however, viable for new readers. Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners?
> Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners?
Someone called Marie Clay, who apparently has something of a celebrity status among teachers [1]. My assessment is that her heart is definitely in the right place, but her rational brain didn't cover itself with glory here.
As the old German saying goes: with the heart you can move mountains, but without the brain, it's easy to put them in the wrong place.
Since the modern era began we have mainly focused on figuring out where to put these mountains and not at all why we would want to move them in the first place.
We are too practical for something as Enlightened as republican democracy.
> In response, several international Reading Recovery affiliated institutions released a statement listing Clay's various awards as proof of the efficacy of her theory
Did they seriously do an appeal to authority when dealing with childrens education?
What I find most incredible of these methods is their insistence on pictures, pictures, pictures! Take cues from the pictures!. I recently listened to the "Sold a Story" podcast, which takes a strong stance against these cueing methodologies, but I felt constant frustration that nobody ever seemed to point out that not every text has accompanying pictures! How do the believers in cueing methods expect a kid to read a headline? Or a sign? Or this very comment?
It’s because of the influence of the Marxist Paolo Freire whose techniques and outlook are the dominant ones in the teaching colleges. He specifically hated phonics since it’s only used for rote and mechanical reading, which is a tool to make the reader useful in capitalism. Instead, he advocated for political and revolutionary techniques to awaken “critical consciousness” or “conscientize” the reader into being a revolutionary.
Although just about every "progressive" educator in the UK/US I've heard or read will cite Freire glowingly, I think we're reading far more into him than is actually there. He very much did advocate for critical consciousness and awakening revolutionary potential, but he is (to use Egan's three-aspect model of academic, developmental and social goals of education) much more on the social than the developmental side of things - the two are not the same! Freire is not so much about every student reaching their own innate potential without "spoiling" them through external pressure, but about molding students to a Marxist view of progress through sufficent application of external pressure. One can disagree with both these approaches while still recognizing that the two are very different things.
The same problem exists to some extent with Marx himself, whether or not you agree with Marxism (I don't), I'm with Freddie deBoer that Marxism is a MATERIALIST not a SPIRITUAL movement; Marx does not want workers to "feel valued" while laboring for their capitalist overlords, he wants them to own the means of production! Some of the "Marxists" in today's university social justice circles would do well to notice that.
Kids not learning how to read at 5 or 6 probably has something to do with the teachers and whatever style of teaching they use. I say that because I've seen motivated parents get their kids reading at younger ages then that. For what it's worth that (getting a four year old to read) is more like a party trick then anything that's actually helpful in my opinion.
All that said the older a kid gets; by 8 or 9 say, the more I tend to suspect there's an issue with the kid or the parents. I think your can use the worst possible teaching technique and by that age most kids should be able to read.
The U.S. puts teachers on a pedestal though where they can either save or ruin children. I don't think it's an accurate view. It puts parents off stage.
> I think your can use the worst possible teaching technique and by that age most kids should be able to read.
According to the "sold a story" podcast (discussed recently on HN too), that's not true: until kids acquire the skill of decoding the letters on the page, they cannot read unfamiliar words. Teaching them to look at the first letter, then take a guess only makes it worse as you're actively teaching them not to decode, this is how you get the andecdote from a middle school teacher on the podcast about the kid who "read" that "in 1939, Germany INVITED Poland".
I learned to read phoneticly with the Victory Drill Book and we used the revised version to teach our kids. IMO, it works extremely well in the few instances I've been close to. If our kids didn't take to it, I'm sure we'd have tried something else, but both our kids went to K-5 already able to read the simple texts used there.
We'd do just a single column of words each night to start. (The book starts with 3 letter words and just that 25-ish words was enough to get them started and interested, then we'd switch to a Dr Seuss or similar kids book for us to read to them.) Later, we'd add more words or longer words as their mastery progressed, and would pick out a challenge word from later in the book. I can still recall my older kid's joy at figuring out the word "television" when they were still at the stage of reading 3 and 4 letter words.
I'm not sure exactly, but based on the Amazon order history, it was a little after their 4th birthday. At that point, attention span is low, so you have to do far less than you think is even worth opening the book for and then switch to something they enjoy more like mommy/daddy reading to them (which we started way, way earlier, of course).
Was a principal about 15 years ago when the "whole language" approach to learning reading and writing was a fad. Had a Grade 1 teacher who emphatically refused to even try it, she was sticking with teaching phonics come hell or high water.
Most of the younger teachers fell for the fad with limited results. The 'old school' teacher consistently produced a class of kids who were reading proficiently by the end of the year, while other classes struggled with that success rate.
When you teach to read, you should often hear yourself saying "Read! Don't make stuff up!".
It's completely natural for a child (a person) to try to wing it as they go. But that's exactly the wrong thing when you are trying to learn to read. If you miss you learn nothing. If you hit, you still learn nothing. But when the mistake is caught and you are forced to undergo the technical process of reading, letter by letter, then you actually learn what this word is.
I have no idea what's so unique about English language that the strategy of winging it started to be encouraged. I haven't heard of any other language that was taught this way.
Maybe it's the bizarre spelling? But many languages have their fair share of that. You just teach children on regularly spelled words first.
I think its not about the English language, its about the American school system. The way curriculum decisions are spread out and the existence of so many petty fiefdoms means that there are many examples where someone is in a position to try to 'make their mark' by changing curriculum and picks a direction based mostly on their personal gut feelings. The 'make your mark' aspect leads away from picking tried-and-true approaches in favor of something more trendy.
I recently started learning Spanish via Language Transfer’s Complete Spanish program. The instructor always says something similar. Stop, think, then go. Don’t rush it. I have not yet seen a situation where the student in the course didn’t know how to do what he asked of them, but I have seen her translate incorrectly initially because she made guesswork of it.
It's a particular "method" developed by people like Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins.
Like many great lies, it has a kernel of truth. If you read the word "horse" and have the vocabulary, then related concepts like "saddle" or "pony" might be activated in your brain so you can "autocomplete" them if they come up later without sounding the word out.
Similarly, if you are reading a text about a horse called Bucephalus, then after decoding it the the first couple of times you will have it "cached" and can skim-read it the next few times it appears.
(If you didn't notice that the word "the" was repeated in the sentence above, then you're also not sounding out every word individually as you go along.)
The problem with the method is that it completely fails as a way for new readers to decode text their "autocomplete" is not already trained on. So you get students reading "horse" when the word is "pony" - and teachers arguing that it doesn't matter because they're getting the meaning out of the text which is what really matters, after all.
I find it interesting that they highlight phonetics because this is a problem quite unique to the madness that is English. In many other languages, phonics rules are quite coherent, thus, once you know the rules, you can read the language, even without understanding what it means. At least I can tell this about the ones I know myself: Italian, Spanish, Polish, Swedish. English, alas, is very inconsistent with its rules.
I was first introduced to the Reading and Writing workshop by my wife about a decade ago. At the time she was teaching 4th grade social studies at a fancy-pants school in Menlo Park. We didn’t talk much about phonetics as these kids could already parse text. For these kids the goal was to get them to read and write.
For this purpose the program is much better than the standard curriculum. Also notice that this was social studies and not English class. Reading and writing is a holistic experience that is required for any academic subject and should be reinforced in every subject.
My wife has informed me that phonetic instructions for first-time readers was already in the program when she was trained almost a decade ago, a revision based on clinical feedback.
My wife fought tooth-and-nail to get rid of the 1960s curriculum of hammering grammar into 9 year olds at the school she was dean of curriculum at here in Austin.
Unfortunately, the Reading and Writing Workshop has been under assault from the popular media recently so now a few teachers are rallying to bring back the 1960s.
The truth is that reading and writing have very little to do with sounding out words and following rules. They are key epistemological activities for humankind.
There’s not much point in teaching people “good grammar” (of which I am a big fan of because I’m a word nerd) beyond social signaling. It certainly isn’t very useful.
The goal of education in our republic is to create an ever-expanding citizenry capable of self-reflection and self-governance. These are Enlightened ideals but so is this entire political project that we’ve been undertaking.
Is this even possible? Look at who could vote in 1781. Would you call them literate? What does literate mean? Does it stop at a 12th grade level? Are you somewhat illiterate if I make a reference to Greek mythology yet you don’t know what the word means? Sure, maybe I should pick “rock” and “hard place” instead of Scylla and Charybdis, and maybe I could limit my vocabulary to just 1,000 basic words, but that comes at a cost.
What self-governance requires is not utilitarian but deeply philosophical in nature. It require a deep love of knowledge for the majority of people who are polled.
This seems to be the motivating factor behind the Reading and Writing Workshop, instilling the love of reading and writing in students, at least from what I have seen second-hand.
These are all incredible goals to strive for once the kids are literate in the trivial basic sense of being capable, when handed an unfamiliar text, of working out what the words are.
If they are literate in that simple trivial way, instilling the love of reading and writing is a worthy goal and they are capable of becoming literate in the various wider political / social senses you describe. Even if they can't yet read in the sense of knowing what all the words and concepts mean, they can at least now encounter and name the things they don't know, and so have paths they can follow to find those things out.
If they are not in this way literate, no amount of instilling the love will help. The texts they are presented with might as well be in Linear A. There is no path to get the words from the page into the child or vice versa, and so the child cannot come to love the activities of reading and writing, wrestle with the ideas they encounter or any other fun enlightened things.
Teaching must begin with the basic building blocks before any other structure can be built above them. Any call to skip that first step before a child has mastered it is a call for lifelong ignorance.
I agree and so do the people who run the Reading and Writing Workshop!
What is missing from the criticism is any sort of purpose or ideal for education in the first place.
Literacy starts with phonics but it must never end there!
It’s sort of like bikeshedding. I guess we can all agree that, yes, we use a phonetic alphabet and learning how to sound things out is going to be a valuable lifelong skill. It’s also hilarious when the technique is applied to names from other languages.
Had a small gap from work for various reasons while being paid. Decided to try hooked on phonics that we used to see all the time on commercials during morning cartoons. I managed to teach my 4 year old how to read at 1st grade level in about 2 months. That stuff really works
https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...
If you have kids or like to teach them how to read, get this book. You won’t regret it.