As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be shipped. They may have even "observed developers" or "measured output" in constructing these things, and thought they had figured out The Way and knew how to systematize it, and deserved to sell it for millions of dollars, along with training, books, etc.
EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of the era. I learned to read at home. Both of my kids, likewise.
It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers. Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.
We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George Orwell.
Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading).
On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.
We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day.
By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored.
Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.
> Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise.
There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized.
I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.
I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the latter, but neither of the former?
And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"?
Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics?
I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?
Phonics were all the rage when I was learning to read. I'm sure it helped me in some way for a year or two. Then I spent five years unlearning phonics. For the most part, I learned by rote memorization of spelling lists and by figuring out words from context through a lot of individual reading. My children learned from rote memorization and from context. Every English-literate person I know learned this way. Every less-literate person I know did not learn this way.
I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.
As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.
> It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
> Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
> I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.
Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology, but isn't English one of the least phonetic alphabets? afaik most other languages have much more consistent pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.
My grandfather sold World Book encyclopedias. He ended up being a regional manager for Fields Enterprises, for World Book. We always had recent editions of the encyclopedia around the house.
That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education.
By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me.
I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.
IIRC, about 65% of children just learn to read with whatever method. The remainder need different strategies or more time or both to help.
I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October.
The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!
>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
>It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special
As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids.
Not every kid learns it automatically, though. My oldest could read before he went to kindergarten (and skipped a grade later), my youngest needed extra help learning to talk. Most kids are somewhere in between those two extremes.
This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian".
Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a work called Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.
From the his wikipedia page [0], he seems to have spent at most 4 years actually teaching (from "early 1960s" to 1964), was a marketing guy among other things before that, and spent a long career writing eductation books and articles and seminars after that.
You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.
Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).
You are right it is `required methodologies`, but wrong on the source.
The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach.
Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply it.
How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has to fight against this stuff all the time.
The US Gov really needs to start in-housing critical tools if only to build internal competency. There also probably needs to be more incentives for individuals inside the USG to excel and produce value. There are too many perverse incentives for unscrupulous contractors to milk tax payers (see the national parks situation [0]).
There is a huge resource imbalance with the amount of money spent generating hype/misinformation targeting USGov acquisitions vs how much is spent on the other end doing research and fostering expertise.
Maybe the way contracts are written/awarded could also just be overhauled for a similar effect.
It is a really interesting problem - my son and my daughter were both taught using phonics - my son had very little interest in reading and spelling (very much like me at his age) but reads at about the level he should (I personally think if he is anything like me, he is doing really well).
My daughter took to reading and spelling like a natural - the same processes just worked for her, and engaged with the way she thinks and acts. She's the type of kid who will write a small essay in each birthday card she writes, where-as my son (like me) will have to be coaxed to write any more than the name and his name.
But get me on a keyboard and I can write for hours - I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper. As an adult I do LOVE reading though, and can have a pretty good go at spelling, though still plenty I get wrong.
> I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper
I don't know your details, and your experience could stem from something like dysgraphia. But I personally did not have any such difficulties and still strongly preferred keyboards to ballpoint pens, until I discovered fountain pens. Within a few weeks of practicing taking notes with a fountain pen I found my handwriting improving dramatically, with much less wrist/hand strain--rediscovered a love of handwriting. (Writing with a fountain pen _requires_ less pen pressure on the paper, and writing with liquid ink moves much more fluidly and expressively than most ballpoint pens.) Might be worth a try at some point. I still type all day for my job, but don't flinch at the idea of taking pages of notes at a conference or church service, and I enjoy writing handwritten letters once again.
Wow, this sounds like my life. I honestly don't remember how I learned to read (although I might guess that it came from a desire to learn about how the world worked).
But I can remember clearly the exact moment my daughter wanted to read for the first time. I read a book to her every night and one particular evening it dawned on her that the stories I was reading to her came from the writing on the page instead of the pictures in the book. From that moment on, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from wanting to read.
The issue is that many schools are expected to teach students at scale. If parents are willing to spend more time coaching their kids instead of outsourcing it, then the problem would be less severe. Good schools generally all have a low teacher to student ratio for a reason. Bloom's 2 sigma problem is very real, spend more time one on one with your kids and even poor pedagogy can yield results.
I don’t know if it’s utopian or dystopian but in 20 years we may have the majority of education being done by AIs. That’s the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
Sure, its not great that they weren't taught the science behind it, but on one episode they quoted a teacher who was taught the new way, and she rejected it because 'she didn't like it'
From the transcript:
"She didn’t come away with an understanding of how children learn to read. She didn’t really learn about the science of reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the training they got during Reading First opened their eyes. Changed their lives even. Some of them still use the materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many other teachers, Reading First represented a change they didn’t like. They were told to follow a curriculum. With structured lessons like the one you heard when Bush visited the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin, it felt traditional and old-fashioned."
And from a later episode:
"Like Christine Cronin. She’s the teacher in Boston who tried to get on board with Bush’s Reading First program, but said the curriculum she was given felt old-fashioned. She remembers looking at the pictures in books by Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins and thinking – that’s what I want my classroom to be like.
Christine Cronin: They framed a picture of reading instruction that seemed beautiful. Like, softly lit rooms. Kids were gonna have cozy nooks where they were curling up with a good book. It got your heart, along with your mind."
This teacher wasn't worried about the science, she was sold on the 'look and feel'.
What does "before kindergarten" mean? In the mornings? Or before she was old enough to go there? I started kindergarten at age 2 (like described in Wikipedia) and I suspect that is not what you mean.
There is a significant portion of academia entranced by novelty, the joy of forbidden or secret knowledge, and other such things. For these people, an idea is not valuable because it is true, or useful, or well-established by experience or science. In fact these are graded as points against an idea. Boring.
Where these academics are most prominent is probably art. Opinionated opinion alert, but these are near the root of the reason why academic art has become utterly annihilated as a viable cultural source. The continual pursuit of novelty and reconstruction above all took them from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even merely interesting into fields so far disconnected from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even interesting that they are now irrelevant, despite their firm beliefs to the contrary.
Education... are pikers compared to them, honestly. But it does seem to be a consistent pattern that some education ideas are proposed and generate excitement precisely because they run contrary to experiences, the expectations of those doing it for years, precisely because they are different from established methods and curricula... and that is enough. Not because they can show better results. Not because of better outcomes. That they are different and heterodox is enough.
Unsurprisingly, when "better" is not part of the evaluation criteria, "better" is not what you get. And that's me being generous; at times "better" would also constitute a strike against the methodology... or at least, what you would consider "better".
Education is strangely bimodal. On the one hand you get savaged at the slightest suggestion that the curriculum is not perfect as is, and we have amazing stasis on what can be taught in most subjects, frozen around a hundred years ago. On the other hand you get crazies who think the solution to math is to start kindergartners out on college-level number theory (the original "New Math") or who want to redo education on the hippie drum circle model and teach math based on how it makes you feel (not thinking of anything in particular here, just a cynical pastiche of what I see out there lately). The one thing you can not do is incrementally improve the existing systems.
In the latter case it astonishes me how these people can zoom straight up to the Federal level sometimes, powered by the sheer academic excitement at a new theory, before anyone can hardly even formulate the thought of maybe running some tests on the new theory before pushing it out to millions of kids, and how this has happened over and over to greater and lesser degrees over the past 60-70 years.
I can also personally vouch for Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It accelerated my ability to teach my kiddo to read by doing exactly what I wasn't an expert in - designing a reading pedagogy. We worked though the book in pandemic kindergarten and I can't help but attribute his current reading success to the work we did back then. It was a silver lining in a time of uncertainty and the memories I have of us working through the book together are memories I'll cherish for the rest of my life.
I've tried this book. My son won't follow the instructions exactly. And the book makes it clear they must be followed exactly. i don't know what to do.
Can vouch - that book is how I learned to read. I became a very strong reader afterward - so much so that when I was 7 the Black and Decker guide to Home Wiring was hours of entertainment.
My wife mixed reading with spelling, starting when each boy was four. She'd work on simple letter sounds, then make a list of 'rhyming' words: sat, pat, fat, cat, mat and so on. They would sound out the list, then come up with some more, even some silly ones like dat or jat. Hilarious! for a four-year-old.
So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.
For what it’s worth, the phonics book you mentioned was worse than useless for my child. After hearing from friends whose son was reading at four about how great this book was, we tried it out for months. It didn’t go well and eventually we gave up. Our daughter took things at her own pace and only really learned to read in second grade. Now she’s a voracious reader, writer, and straight-A computer science student in her junior year of college.
The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.
We also used "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" for both of our kids. It works outrageously well and we've recommended it to all our friends with young children.
Fans of "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" might wish to check out "Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach" [0]. It uses a similar phonics approach but uses basic pattern matching to teach kids in a much simpler format. Be sure to check out the reviews for the original and newer edition.
Used that book for my son at around age 4. He never learned to love reading, but he’s a good reader.
One thing that always perplexed me is his spelling/writing. He does very little reading on his own. But he spells and writes incredibly well. He can spell words he has never seen before - I think he can apply implicit rules after seeing relatively few examples.
Thats a great book and one i've used with my kids. My only issue with it is the pages are so 'busy' and jammed with content that it's hard for kids to focus, even with parent's guidance pointing at the word segments.
+1 to "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". It's step by step and doesn't require a large amount of planning or thinking from the parent. Which means it's easy, which means you'll do it. Even when busy
An excellent book. I taught all of my kids to read with it. All are strong readers. By lesson 70 or so, most of them had caught the gist and didn't need to finish it out. Highly recommended.
The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out to be.
No way. That is absolute bullshit. You can tell, because they cite exactly zero studies showing some other way is better. They are looking at scores over time with no control, which can be decreasing for any other reason.
Phonics based reading instruction is response to the massive scandal that already happened in the US where they tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction, three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education researchers with new books to sell don't want to accept that the boring way works better, especially for students with less support at home (where parents often use phonics to teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.
Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"?
In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.
I am shocked this comment exists, when the counter-example is literally written into it. English uses the latin alphabet which is a phonetic alphabet. It's why english readers can also 'read' Spanish without understanding any of the words. Anyone who says otherwise should be promptly ignored.
One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good" and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).
I just listened to this podcast a few weeks ago. What really struck me was just how obviously wrong the Guided Reading curriculum and three cueing theory was even just on its face, and how many people went along with replacing phonics with Guided Reading despite that.
For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that there's no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that's a level of stupidity that's actually high enough to make me angry.
Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three cuing). Like, sure context can be a component of reading, but it's trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so clearly context isn't that important for strong readers, and teaching kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn't need a scientific study to figure that out.
> covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it.
That produces kids that don't read, in the normal sense of the word; rather, they synthesize a text based on guesswork, and confidently declare that it says what it doesn't say. My daughter is a primary teacher, and has complained about this. It happens.
It seems completely barmy, to me.
Incidentally, it sounds a lot like what ChatGPT does.
It's true, masked-language-modelling has been hugely successful in natural language processing. So a priori I wouldn't have guessed it would work so poorly for humans and that phonics-based teaching is so much better. But the evidence is clear.
Just because MLM can work doesn't mean it does work in all contexts. We get to change the software (and hardware although that has been less relevant IMHO) behind ML models as much as we want, for humans we need to adapt the training methods.
Your example sentence was incredibly hard to read for me. To be fair English isn't my primary language. But still, I think it could be that different people read in different ways, so some depend more on context than others, etc.
I think they've extended the meaning of "reading" to include a certain level of "understanding what you just read". Your nonsense sentence can't pass the latter test because there is no understanding to be gleaned, but it's not at all obvious that that should how we view reading exactly for that reason.
Correct, but I don't know if they've extended anything. When you say someone reads at the 12th grade level, it has never meant that they can superficially sound out every word, it means they can understand what the text is trying to say.
Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?
Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.
These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that were known to be wrong because they don't like the style of the effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach people because you don't like an effective approach is criminal.
Again from the podcast:
"Good reading instruction isn’t boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring. But this shouldn’t be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need.
And there’s no reason that reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can’t be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she’s now selling."
Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if it were.
Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she persuaded them through teaching and advocacy.
FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable civil case against Teacher's College, and other places where teachers were taught this nonsense, for harms done. If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit. But we don't generally put teachers and doctors in the same bucket; for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.
> If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit
But we don't see one with respect to popular nutritional advice, which is in a very dismal state with the old food pyramid being promoted as the way and no one can agree on anything because nothing is reproducible.
This isn't a free speech issue. This is a matter of fraud. Claiming you have methods of teaching literacy when you don't is fraud. Lying or pressuring congressman to get government grants is equally fraud.
> Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal.
It is for certain professions. And the criteria for civil liability are much lighter than that for criminal liability. All professionals should carry liability insurance. And, they should operate under the protection of a limited liability company or something similar.
Yes, early elementary reading education should include phonics. Calkins would agree - her first reading curriculum (which is relatively new compared to her writing work) tells schools using the program to supplement it with a phonics curriculum; That wasn't her specialty (just like she doesn't cover math and history). Reducing all reading instruction to phonics is wildly reductive, and her program does a good job at the non-phonics components (and possibly phonics too now? I believe they've added a lot more of that to the base curriculum with the recent revisions, but no personal experience).
I think we should all stop using the term "phonics".
If you read the whole article I think you will agree that what you call "phonics" is actually just "reading"...
All of the rest, the context, cues, word-recognition, is something on top of seeing the letters, knowing the sound the make individually, knowing the sound they make when put in sequence. Good readers still see all the letters, don't work on guessing context, looking for cues, or seeing words as unified pictures.
All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are:
- if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds
- Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts
I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The Hollyhock Foundation and others. I'm not saying this model is bad or impugning anyone's motives here; on the contrary I would say people are acting more or less in good faith. I'm just saying there are definitely agendas here.
For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading (SOR), have a look here [0].
We taught our daughter to read at age 3 using the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I remember when we first brought her to kindergarten and mentioned that she was already a competent reader--her teacher seemed oddly insistent about downplaying her abilities, and kept correcting us to say that she was "decoding" the text, rather than reading it.
OK, if you say so--she's sitting in her room for hours a day silently "decoding" her books.
Anyhow, our anecdotal evidence of 1 suggests that this method works and was the foundation of a (so-far) lifetime love of reading!
We're going through it now, the same book 100 lessons. I have two kids, one is almost 6 and one is 3.5. We got the book because the 6 year old was struggling considerably with reading. The book is a real effort to go through and requires a lot of patience with the 6 year old. Thankfully we are 80% of the way through it. The incredible thing is the 3.5 year old sees the older one do it and she wants to do it and she's actually on track to read much earlier than the 6 year old. It's really something to watch. I'm glad we found this book (actually on another HN thread..)
My wife, who is actually an early childhood montessori educator, was vehemently against the book, and I had to tell her, "look whatever we're doing right now isn't working, we need to do something different". Educational methodology is almost something like a religion hence such a strong need for what should be more "experienced-based" teaching. Do what works, tested on children, versus proving of academic scientific hypotheses. Sometimes what works just works and should be continued until something better can be identified. Again, a lot of this is anecdotal, but it was definitely an uphill battle. Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not be able to read.
We use the same book with our kids, and had a similar experience with educators. When she moved a to new school in first grade, they were extremely skeptical that she has able to read chapter books.
But I don't think it was specific to reading — they pulled the same crap when it came to other subjects. My sense is they don't want to admit when a student comes in with lots of skills because then they can't take credit for how well the student is doing at the end of the year. This is shown on report cards, where they never put down at/above grade level in the fall/winter quarters, even when the child is clearly multiple grade levels ahead. If they admitted that up front, they wouldn't be able to show "growth".
Most of the time I defend teachers, but I confess to feeling pretty weird about it because with some (super notable) exceptions I had pretty bad experiences with them. I have a lot of opinions about schools/teachers/education whatever but they're pretty polemic and would derail.
But, very glad you found success with your daughter. My partner and I just had a kid and what I wouldn't give for her to sit through us reading a very short book to her without yelling very loudly. One day haha :)
I would be a bit cautious about taking teachers' word for what works and what doesn't work. Every critical piece on reading instruction on the US seems to make it pretty clear that teachers have a strong emotional and political attachment to the "whole language" method that might cloud their judgement and motivate their reasoning. See for instance the opening quote of an older article in Time (https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers...):
> 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 a teacher group to throw [a phonics-based curriculum] out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.
There are plenty of academics who oppose or have reservations about the capital-letters Science of Reading https://radicalscholarship.com/2022/05/23/nyt-blasts-calkins... . Of course they, too, could be ideologically motivated or stubbornly attached to their existing beliefs, for all I know, but it's clearly not a clean split between academics and teachers.
That definitely comes through in the piece the parent linked, it's very much a narrative of fighting against misinformed outsiders pushing phonics for various research-based reasons, instead of just trusting teachers.
Of course 'phonics only' wouldn't work, but this 'guess your way to reading' type of instruction was used with two of my three kids and I can tell you it was a joke.
It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to a private school that taught phonics as a core function of their reading curriculum did they start to actually read.
I haven't listened to the podcast so I can't speak to it's content but I'm interested to hear if what their talking about matches my experience.
Yeah I mean, other commenters have noted that it takes a while for curricula to change, but yeah I bet that's what was going on and that sounds like bad instruction.
I'd dispute your characterization of the NEPC summary as well-reasoned. It's definitely a different perspective, but it's clear in a preference for valuing the experience and beliefs of "literacy scholars" over any sort of evidence that could contradict them. It does seems like a good view of the education institution's side of this argument.
It is careful to point out even minority criticism of phonics-centered instruction, while suggesting that disagreement with cueing approaches is a result of misunderstanding. It explicitly devalues "narrow" "experimental and quasi-experimental research" in favor of
"decades of classroom-based and other forms of qualitative research" (how long has the experimental research been going on?). Even the naming feels slanted: the cueing approach gets called "whole language" or "balanced literacy" while opposing views start with "simple view of literacy". The "structured literacy" section ends with "although literacy researchers caution there is
still much to learn about the brain and learning to read", while the cueing summary is free of similar caveats and emphasizes that it can adapt to individual students, as if other methods couldn't.
Ultimately it makes no actionable recommendations for what should actually be taught, except that no particular method should be mandated or banned, and that education should be "student-centered" (curious about the alternative...).
I mean, I guess a good of framing this is yeah, it is "the education institution's side of this argument". I see it as informed by decades of shifting research on how to teach reading and attentive to the tension between "we need regulations to guard against bad teachers" and "we need to give teachers the freedom to apply their expertise". Most of the rest of your argument is just not realizing that those are the actual names of things (e.g. there's actually a thing called "the simple view of literacy").
And to zoom out a little, a big part of educational quality is "do good people want to teach". A heavily prescribed curriculum is one more barrier to retaining good, motivated teachers. I'm not saying phonics shouldn't be taught, and I'm not saying teachers should have the freedom to not teach it. I am saying that all the teachers I know have kids where phonics didn't work (either the kid wasn't getting it, or the kid already knew it and drilling it into them killed their passion for reading, but hey standardized testing), and that's the kind of thing that makes good people quit: you know something is counterproductive, but your boss/the man makes you do it anyway, and in this case you fail a kid.
The problem is complex, which is why my 2nd bullet point was "Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts". Another way of saying this is "school isn't a restaurant where you pull up and order an education from an unskilled worker". I get that it's high stakes and people have super bad experiences with educators (I have, for sure), but we need to appreciate the nuance here.
Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step. The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all, and we regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
> Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step
Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what any of it is.
> The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all
This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole language works OK.
> regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and it's not been going great [0], for instance.
> If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
You've gotta wonder how a nation's schooling standards shift to something like "Whole language" without, say, at least testing the methodologies to see if it results in better or worse outcomes. Seems like no actual validation was done.
AFAIK (I know lots of teachers) "whoops, phonics was actually right all along" was back to being the state-of-the-art like 15+ years ago, among the academic-side of teacher education. Whole language only hung around because it had a lot of True Believers already in the classroom, and some districts were (and still are) slow to correct, but it was pretty clear years and years ago that it was harmful.
This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.
Yeah. I mean I agree that Heinemann is milking books they've already put resources into publishing and they should quit. And I'm sure there's a bunch of teachers who aren't good at teaching or being humans and not teaching very well. But the core conceit of Sold a Story is there's currently a huge problem with reading pedagogy everywhere, and that's at least currently false, and maybe was never true.
> if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds
Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.
I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding out? I clearly remember myself learning to read, sounding out words and then being like 'oh that word is X'. And I see the same wheels turning with my daughter.
For a long time I've held the unpopular opinion that most elementary teachers are utterly incompetent, and that as an academic field, Education is becoming more and more bullshit. I will be down-voted to hell because of this, and yet, the reality always seems to agree with my world-view.
I don't mean to come off as a grumpy Xennial, but the more I interact with people in professional roles (attorneys, doctors, nurses, teachers, managers) the more I'm convince the majority of people are just incompetent. Sometimes I try and reframe this into "you have unreasonably high expectations maybe because of some personality/upbringing weirdness", but, ongoing battle haha.
I like my kids' elementary school teachers, they seem fine, and maybe it's mostly about teaching kids to behave in another social setting at that age - but I do have it in the back of my mind that zero of the best and brightest from my graduating high school class (judged by who was in the honors / AP classes) went into teaching elementary school.
Sold a Story isn't alone; John McWhorter (a Columbia professor of linguistics) has a very similar take on phonics and has written about it in The Atlantic and the NYT.
As for bias, I understand SOS was funded by some foundation, though it's not clear what ideological bent the Hollyhock Foundation might have that would taint the reporting. I'm pretty sure Professor McWhorter is shooting straight here — he tends to speak his mind, regardless of how many friends it makes or (mostly, these days) loses him.
No one is talking about the impact of kids seeing parents read on phones instead kids seeing parents read on books. When kids see a parent reading a book there's no doubt as to what they're doing. They are reading.
OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. There is a nonzero chance that it could be interpreted by the child as the parent watching a video. Or playing a game.
Children have a very powerful desire to imitate, and it should not be ignored in the debate on literacy.
I don't think the kid even has to be confused about what the parent is doing.
If a kid sees a parent on the phone all the time (reading), they want to imitate being on the phone. The fact that the parent is reading is a second level distinction that matters less to young kids, especially when they can more easily imitate "using the phone" by playing games or watching videos.
My 3yo gets about 10m a day of Khan Academy on my phone. That and video calls to mom are ALL he gets on my phone. Hopefully this is setting expectations for this particular technology/medium.
100%! We read to our kids a TON from the day they were born -- no tricks or gimmicks, we just read to them. A lot. And they've always seen us reading actual books. YMMV, but our kids learned to read early and well and they both still enjoy reading. A lot.
Yup. Kids think my phone === games/videos. They know it can do other stuff but why would anyone use all those boring apps when games or videos are available?
I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods.
I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.
From friends that have suffered through education degrees, it doesn’t sound like the field sees itself as a part of the scientific community at all.
There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators.
The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than scientifically proven effectiveness research.
It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we had made a mistake.
There are mountains of education research out there. Some collages actually do focus on it, but the real goal is to prepare people for the workplace by jumping though whatever hoops are mandatory.
Research is largely ignored because what actually determines what’s used is politics not some rigorous validation of what works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not because it’s particularly useful, but because it’s been privatized and the only way for those companies to make even more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to convince people more testing was needed, which worked.
Luckily it’s shocking easy to educate most people, almost like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff…
This was something that I and a friend found surprising when he was studying to become a primary school teacher in the UK. A lot of the education for teachers in the UK is effectively 18th century philosophy taught uncritically - the likes of Rousseau, etc...
We both have a university background in philosophy (we both did the US equivalent of "majoring" in it, and I went to graduate level) and what we found disturbing was how uncritical and non-evidence based the teaching of teachers was. It seems like a fair bit of non-practical teaching of teaching, at least in the UK, is ideological indoctrination. They aren't "doing philosophy" in the sense that you would in a philosophy course where you are meant to be critical in your engagement, but are being told to accept philosophical arguments as doctrine.
So in a way its not surprising to me that teachers fall for other doctrinal ways of teaching.
You go to linguistics departments and they actually do stuff around evidence based child language acquisition, meanwhile teaching colleges ignore that and teach an unreflective centuries old ideology about how children learn.
There appears to be a big cultural gap between say linguistics departments and education departments.
This was exactly my experience. I had to pass a review board before I began my senior year, and it was essentially an "ideological indoctrination" examination. I said what they wanted to hear. What else was I going to go with the 3 years of education that I had already purchased? I was fortunate to study at a college that emphasized field-based experience, because it was the only degree-related value that I left with.
In the end, I spent more hours earning my degree than using it. I work in software now.
In my education degree program, in the intro class we spent time every week discussing recent research papers we had read. I was interested in practicing, not doing research, but when selecting schools there were clearly some that had a research focus and some that had a practical focus.
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that education was way too politicised, any new minister of education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad.
This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language phenomenon known as "méthode globale" didn't last very long in France), the debate on constructivism, etc...
Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences bungle somewhere below even social psychology. There's no reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and ministeries, and mandate methods and topics.
We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.
Just to steelman for a second but educational research is obviously quite hard (long horizons, large costs including opportunity costs, vulnerable groups necessitating careful ethical standards and consideration).
I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given equal investment.
A common trait in the US political system. "If the person on the other side of the aisle disagrees with me on points A, B, and C, but agrees with me on point D then I need to reevaluate my position on point D." I noticed this when the pandemic began. For about a week when we first went into lockdown my very conservative and very liberal friends were all worried about getting the virus and what the effects might be. But I knew even before it happened that this mentality wouldn't last and that eventually people would look around and go "wait, we're on the same side as THOSE people? Something isn't right!"
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories.
My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read.
Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more.
Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...
I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to make sawdust or music, not do more research.
The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.
And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.
That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.
For teachers to be able to correct, there needs to be some level of social trust - parents need to trust that when a teacher corrects their child, they're doing it out of a desire to act in the child's best long-term interest: In loco parentis. The teachers also need to be backed up by their administration and even the law.
That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right, Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is for 15 minutes.")
tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!)
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons:
- teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit. Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an effective social worker for students in need, fundraising, classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely.
- there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge - some of them actively discourage new teachers from trying out what they learned in university because "we always did it this way".
- closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons. Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time", "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list is endless.
- frankly said, no one cares about education. Big Labor doesn't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms, restaurants and other menial work who don't object to exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged children where the parents take care for good private schools to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent people.
- there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own.
- a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty has exploded...
> I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the
rooftops about this for generations.
For example from another story posted here today:
Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.
Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all?
Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.
There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.
My daughter went through a Montessori education from 18 months old through grade 8. As part of her Montessori experience, starting at age three, she began to learn to write. They trace "sandpaper" letters with their fingers; moving their fingers along the strokes of letters pre-printed on cardboard in a rough texture. From there they learn to write the letters and words, speaking the words aloud. Thus the focus is on learning to write before reading, with an implication that this process will help with word recognition.
I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori things) surprising.
I don't think it has much to do with learning reading or writing first, but more about learning letters before you progress to words, before you progress to sentences, etc.
I don't think it really matters if you start with writing or reading first, because it's basically the same skill: knowing letter shapes and knowing which sound corresponds. It's that learning really benefits from receiving the same information in different contexts. So as long as you both teach them to write and read, the order doesn't really matter.
One reason for using the cardboard letters for younger children is that the brain regions handling bodily movement are much more advanced, and thus provide more context which (as stated earlier) helps in memorization.
But I suspect the main reason for using the sandpaper letters is because it is way more interesting for the children to have something with tactile feedback, instead of just looking at a flat card.
Probably not really about word recognition, but about being an agent in the world. Reading is fundamentally a passive experience. The best reader in the world may as well be Stephen Hawking.
From my understanding, Montessori is more about doing + engagement than passive learning, and the emphasis on writing would be a way to express those values.
I never gave it much thought, but I am currently teaching my 3-year-old to write letters first because I think the recognition and muscle memory with the letters would help with stringing the letters together later.
It might be pedagogically novel, but I'm confident lots of people learn this way, at least for alphabet-based languages.
I know it's not your point, but learning to write by tracing at age 3 doesn't sound anything like the actual teachings of Maria Montessori. The whole point is child directed learning, and having kids at 3 trace things sounds pretty anti-ethical towards that.
Most of this stuff is parent directed because they want little Johnny to be brilliant, but afaik goes against pretty much all early childhood development research.
Give charity to the idea. Odds are high they had a ton of tracing stations available, and the kids that gravitated to it, used it. That is, the idea is to enable learning by availability of opportunities and encouragement.
So, no. This doesn't go against any research. Unless you frame it in the most uncharitable way that you can.
This is just my personal experience. My first son was able to read when he was 2.5 yo. I read Dr. Suess to him every night since he was 1 yo. At first I would read and let him finish the last word in the sentence, the rhyming part. One day I asked him to try reading the whole sentence and he did. I thought maybe I read to him so much that he memorized it, as I was starting to memorized some of the books. I switch to different book and he was able to read a few sentences. I tried a book we haven't read yet (higher level Dr. Suess's book) and he was able to read 20%. Taking turn on the pages made it fun and I tried to exaggerate some of the words to make it more dramatic, like CRASH!!!.
Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that. Being a public support station, they tend to have sponsor promotions quite a bit, so my son was listing to classical music and people talking. I believe the music and the talking sound got him to be familiar with English phonic early, so when it comes to reading, the rhythm is not so strange.
Sadly, with the second son, we had to split time with two kids and more work, we didn't do the same routine. He was barely reading when he got into kindergarden. But thank God he had a great teacher in 1st grade, over zoom she taught most of the class to read. My kids actually excelled during pandemic teaching over zoom. Of course we were there to help them along.
I think reading is priority one for any kid. Once they learn to read, they are more independent, read menu and decide for themselves, read instructions to build LEGOs, read street names, really open the world to them.
So I started learning. I learned in different ways, you know - to watch German movies, play German speeches on my iPod when I sleep. Your brain remembers things you don't even know. It's beautiful.
Learning by listening to something during your sleep doesn't work. Brains go into a sort of maintenance mode during sleep, and it's not possible for your brain to sleep and interpret & comprehend sensory input at the same time.
Most likely the noise will have a negative effect on the length and quality of your sleep, which does have a proven negative effect on memory.
So it's probably better for you to learn while your awake and just sleep at night.
Readit News
EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers. Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading).
On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.
By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored.
Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise.
There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized.
I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.
And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"?
Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics?
I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?
I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.
As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.
> Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
> I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.
That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.
That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education.
By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me.
I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.
I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October.
The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!
No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids.
Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound different.
Oh, wait...
Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a work called Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.
You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Engelmann
The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach.
Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply it.
How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has to fight against this stuff all the time.
There is a huge resource imbalance with the amount of money spent generating hype/misinformation targeting USGov acquisitions vs how much is spent on the other end doing research and fostering expertise.
Maybe the way contracts are written/awarded could also just be overhauled for a similar effect.
[0]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
My daughter took to reading and spelling like a natural - the same processes just worked for her, and engaged with the way she thinks and acts. She's the type of kid who will write a small essay in each birthday card she writes, where-as my son (like me) will have to be coaxed to write any more than the name and his name.
But get me on a keyboard and I can write for hours - I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper. As an adult I do LOVE reading though, and can have a pretty good go at spelling, though still plenty I get wrong.
> I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper
I don't know your details, and your experience could stem from something like dysgraphia. But I personally did not have any such difficulties and still strongly preferred keyboards to ballpoint pens, until I discovered fountain pens. Within a few weeks of practicing taking notes with a fountain pen I found my handwriting improving dramatically, with much less wrist/hand strain--rediscovered a love of handwriting. (Writing with a fountain pen _requires_ less pen pressure on the paper, and writing with liquid ink moves much more fluidly and expressively than most ballpoint pens.) Might be worth a try at some point. I still type all day for my job, but don't flinch at the idea of taking pages of notes at a conference or church service, and I enjoy writing handwritten letters once again.
But I can remember clearly the exact moment my daughter wanted to read for the first time. I read a book to her every night and one particular evening it dawned on her that the stories I was reading to her came from the writing on the page instead of the pictures in the book. From that moment on, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from wanting to read.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why...
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap...
From the transcript:
"She didn’t come away with an understanding of how children learn to read. She didn’t really learn about the science of reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the training they got during Reading First opened their eyes. Changed their lives even. Some of them still use the materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many other teachers, Reading First represented a change they didn’t like. They were told to follow a curriculum. With structured lessons like the one you heard when Bush visited the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin, it felt traditional and old-fashioned."
And from a later episode:
"Like Christine Cronin. She’s the teacher in Boston who tried to get on board with Bush’s Reading First program, but said the curriculum she was given felt old-fashioned. She remembers looking at the pictures in books by Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins and thinking – that’s what I want my classroom to be like.
Christine Cronin: They framed a picture of reading instruction that seemed beautiful. Like, softly lit rooms. Kids were gonna have cozy nooks where they were curling up with a good book. It got your heart, along with your mind."
This teacher wasn't worried about the science, she was sold on the 'look and feel'.
Where these academics are most prominent is probably art. Opinionated opinion alert, but these are near the root of the reason why academic art has become utterly annihilated as a viable cultural source. The continual pursuit of novelty and reconstruction above all took them from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even merely interesting into fields so far disconnected from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even interesting that they are now irrelevant, despite their firm beliefs to the contrary.
Education... are pikers compared to them, honestly. But it does seem to be a consistent pattern that some education ideas are proposed and generate excitement precisely because they run contrary to experiences, the expectations of those doing it for years, precisely because they are different from established methods and curricula... and that is enough. Not because they can show better results. Not because of better outcomes. That they are different and heterodox is enough.
Unsurprisingly, when "better" is not part of the evaluation criteria, "better" is not what you get. And that's me being generous; at times "better" would also constitute a strike against the methodology... or at least, what you would consider "better".
Education is strangely bimodal. On the one hand you get savaged at the slightest suggestion that the curriculum is not perfect as is, and we have amazing stasis on what can be taught in most subjects, frozen around a hundred years ago. On the other hand you get crazies who think the solution to math is to start kindergartners out on college-level number theory (the original "New Math") or who want to redo education on the hippie drum circle model and teach math based on how it makes you feel (not thinking of anything in particular here, just a cynical pastiche of what I see out there lately). The one thing you can not do is incrementally improve the existing systems.
In the latter case it astonishes me how these people can zoom straight up to the Federal level sometimes, powered by the sheer academic excitement at a new theory, before anyone can hardly even formulate the thought of maybe running some tests on the new theory before pushing it out to millions of kids, and how this has happened over and over to greater and lesser degrees over the past 60-70 years.
2) What's an example piece which you think has helped "annihilate" academic art?
So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.
> Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
It worked for my kid, too. And it's worked for my friends' kids. And for at least one stranger who read a previous HN comment I wrote.
If you have a child who is 3, 4 or 5, today (or whenever Amazon delivers) is the best time to start.
The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814311156?psc=1
Definitely a top 10 all time purchase.
One thing that always perplexed me is his spelling/writing. He does very little reading on his own. But he spells and writes incredibly well. He can spell words he has never seen before - I think he can apply implicit rules after seeing relatively few examples.
Thats a great book and one i've used with my kids. My only issue with it is the pages are so 'busy' and jammed with content that it's hard for kids to focus, even with parent's guidance pointing at the word segments.
Dead Comment
Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out to be.
Phonics based reading instruction is response to the massive scandal that already happened in the US where they tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction, three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education researchers with new books to sell don't want to accept that the boring way works better, especially for students with less support at home (where parents often use phonics to teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/school...
https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/03/13/richmond-school-find...
In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.
This article compares Scotland with England: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-ch...
One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good" and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).
For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that there's no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that's a level of stupidity that's actually high enough to make me angry.
Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three cuing). Like, sure context can be a component of reading, but it's trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so clearly context isn't that important for strong readers, and teaching kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn't need a scientific study to figure that out.
That produces kids that don't read, in the normal sense of the word; rather, they synthesize a text based on guesswork, and confidently declare that it says what it doesn't say. My daughter is a primary teacher, and has complained about this. It happens.
It seems completely barmy, to me.
Incidentally, it sounds a lot like what ChatGPT does.
Great, the next education fad will be trying to teach kids like some software engineer trained his algorithm.
"Hey kids, start your integration over this new 1TB data set. Remember to adjust your weights after each iteration!"
Just because MLM can work doesn't mean it does work in all contexts. We get to change the software (and hardware although that has been less relevant IMHO) behind ML models as much as we want, for humans we need to adapt the training methods.
Deleted Comment
Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?
Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.
These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that were known to be wrong because they don't like the style of the effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach people because you don't like an effective approach is criminal.
Again from the podcast:
"Good reading instruction isn’t boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring. But this shouldn’t be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need.
And there’s no reason that reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can’t be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she’s now selling."
Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if it were.
Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she persuaded them through teaching and advocacy.
FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable civil case against Teacher's College, and other places where teachers were taught this nonsense, for harms done. If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit. But we don't generally put teachers and doctors in the same bucket; for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.
> If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit
But we don't see one with respect to popular nutritional advice, which is in a very dismal state with the old food pyramid being promoted as the way and no one can agree on anything because nothing is reproducible.
So, maybe not the best analogy.
It is for certain professions. And the criteria for civil liability are much lighter than that for criminal liability. All professionals should carry liability insurance. And, they should operate under the protection of a limited liability company or something similar.
Well, you've hit upon a thing I'd like to see teachers actually do! Nice, thanks for that.
Yeah dude, people expect you to be able to explain your reasoning. Even reasoning that you did in the past(!) which is pretty much all of it.
If you read the whole article I think you will agree that what you call "phonics" is actually just "reading"...
All of the rest, the context, cues, word-recognition, is something on top of seeing the letters, knowing the sound the make individually, knowing the sound they make when put in sequence. Good readers still see all the letters, don't work on guessing context, looking for cues, or seeing words as unified pictures.
- if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds
- Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts
I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The Hollyhock Foundation and others. I'm not saying this model is bad or impugning anyone's motives here; on the contrary I would say people are acting more or less in good faith. I'm just saying there are definitely agendas here.
For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading (SOR), have a look here [0].
[0]: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
OK, if you say so--she's sitting in her room for hours a day silently "decoding" her books.
Anyhow, our anecdotal evidence of 1 suggests that this method works and was the foundation of a (so-far) lifetime love of reading!
My wife, who is actually an early childhood montessori educator, was vehemently against the book, and I had to tell her, "look whatever we're doing right now isn't working, we need to do something different". Educational methodology is almost something like a religion hence such a strong need for what should be more "experienced-based" teaching. Do what works, tested on children, versus proving of academic scientific hypotheses. Sometimes what works just works and should be continued until something better can be identified. Again, a lot of this is anecdotal, but it was definitely an uphill battle. Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not be able to read.
But I don't think it was specific to reading — they pulled the same crap when it came to other subjects. My sense is they don't want to admit when a student comes in with lots of skills because then they can't take credit for how well the student is doing at the end of the year. This is shown on report cards, where they never put down at/above grade level in the fall/winter quarters, even when the child is clearly multiple grade levels ahead. If they admitted that up front, they wouldn't be able to show "growth".
But, very glad you found success with your daughter. My partner and I just had a kid and what I wouldn't give for her to sit through us reading a very short book to her without yelling very loudly. One day haha :)
> 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 a teacher group to throw [a phonics-based curriculum] out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.
It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to a private school that taught phonics as a core function of their reading curriculum did they start to actually read.
I haven't listened to the podcast so I can't speak to it's content but I'm interested to hear if what their talking about matches my experience.
It is careful to point out even minority criticism of phonics-centered instruction, while suggesting that disagreement with cueing approaches is a result of misunderstanding. It explicitly devalues "narrow" "experimental and quasi-experimental research" in favor of "decades of classroom-based and other forms of qualitative research" (how long has the experimental research been going on?). Even the naming feels slanted: the cueing approach gets called "whole language" or "balanced literacy" while opposing views start with "simple view of literacy". The "structured literacy" section ends with "although literacy researchers caution there is still much to learn about the brain and learning to read", while the cueing summary is free of similar caveats and emphasizes that it can adapt to individual students, as if other methods couldn't.
Ultimately it makes no actionable recommendations for what should actually be taught, except that no particular method should be mandated or banned, and that education should be "student-centered" (curious about the alternative...).
And to zoom out a little, a big part of educational quality is "do good people want to teach". A heavily prescribed curriculum is one more barrier to retaining good, motivated teachers. I'm not saying phonics shouldn't be taught, and I'm not saying teachers should have the freedom to not teach it. I am saying that all the teachers I know have kids where phonics didn't work (either the kid wasn't getting it, or the kid already knew it and drilling it into them killed their passion for reading, but hey standardized testing), and that's the kind of thing that makes good people quit: you know something is counterproductive, but your boss/the man makes you do it anyway, and in this case you fail a kid.
The problem is complex, which is why my 2nd bullet point was "Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts". Another way of saying this is "school isn't a restaurant where you pull up and order an education from an unskilled worker". I get that it's high stakes and people have super bad experiences with educators (I have, for sure), but we need to appreciate the nuance here.
If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what any of it is.
> The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all
This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole language works OK.
> regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and it's not been going great [0], for instance.
> If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
Let's be a little more civil than this.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.
Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.
As for bias, I understand SOS was funded by some foundation, though it's not clear what ideological bent the Hollyhock Foundation might have that would taint the reporting. I'm pretty sure Professor McWhorter is shooting straight here — he tends to speak his mind, regardless of how many friends it makes or (mostly, these days) loses him.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel...
OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. There is a nonzero chance that it could be interpreted by the child as the parent watching a video. Or playing a game.
Children have a very powerful desire to imitate, and it should not be ignored in the debate on literacy.
If a kid sees a parent on the phone all the time (reading), they want to imitate being on the phone. The fact that the parent is reading is a second level distinction that matters less to young kids, especially when they can more easily imitate "using the phone" by playing games or watching videos.
There's a "nonzero chance" your dead tree book is a game too ala Sudoku.
I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.
There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators.
The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than scientifically proven effectiveness research.
It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we had made a mistake.
Research is largely ignored because what actually determines what’s used is politics not some rigorous validation of what works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not because it’s particularly useful, but because it’s been privatized and the only way for those companies to make even more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to convince people more testing was needed, which worked.
Luckily it’s shocking easy to educate most people, almost like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff…
We both have a university background in philosophy (we both did the US equivalent of "majoring" in it, and I went to graduate level) and what we found disturbing was how uncritical and non-evidence based the teaching of teachers was. It seems like a fair bit of non-practical teaching of teaching, at least in the UK, is ideological indoctrination. They aren't "doing philosophy" in the sense that you would in a philosophy course where you are meant to be critical in your engagement, but are being told to accept philosophical arguments as doctrine.
So in a way its not surprising to me that teachers fall for other doctrinal ways of teaching.
You go to linguistics departments and they actually do stuff around evidence based child language acquisition, meanwhile teaching colleges ignore that and teach an unreflective centuries old ideology about how children learn.
There appears to be a big cultural gap between say linguistics departments and education departments.
In the end, I spent more hours earning my degree than using it. I work in software now.
My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that education was way too politicised, any new minister of education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad.
This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language phenomenon known as "méthode globale" didn't last very long in France), the debate on constructivism, etc...
We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.
If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.
I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given equal investment.
This is the problem.
My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read.
Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics
The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.
And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.
That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.
That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right, Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is for 15 minutes.")
tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!)
There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons:
- teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit. Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an effective social worker for students in need, fundraising, classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely.
- there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge - some of them actively discourage new teachers from trying out what they learned in university because "we always did it this way".
- closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons. Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time", "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list is endless.
- frankly said, no one cares about education. Big Labor doesn't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms, restaurants and other menial work who don't object to exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged children where the parents take care for good private schools to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent people.
- there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own.
- a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty has exploded...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...
I'd also say part of the cause of this are the teacher unions. When we don't do merit based promotions and raises, people don't care as much.
You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the rooftops about this for generations.
For example from another story posted here today:
Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all?Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.
There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.
I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori things) surprising.
I don't think it really matters if you start with writing or reading first, because it's basically the same skill: knowing letter shapes and knowing which sound corresponds. It's that learning really benefits from receiving the same information in different contexts. So as long as you both teach them to write and read, the order doesn't really matter.
One reason for using the cardboard letters for younger children is that the brain regions handling bodily movement are much more advanced, and thus provide more context which (as stated earlier) helps in memorization.
But I suspect the main reason for using the sandpaper letters is because it is way more interesting for the children to have something with tactile feedback, instead of just looking at a flat card.
From my understanding, Montessori is more about doing + engagement than passive learning, and the emphasis on writing would be a way to express those values.
It might be pedagogically novel, but I'm confident lots of people learn this way, at least for alphabet-based languages.
Most of this stuff is parent directed because they want little Johnny to be brilliant, but afaik goes against pretty much all early childhood development research.
So, no. This doesn't go against any research. Unless you frame it in the most uncharitable way that you can.
Trevor Noah talking about how he learnt German.
https://youtu.be/2PWSJH02krs?t=56
So I started learning. I learned in different ways, you know - to watch German movies, play German speeches on my iPod when I sleep. Your brain remembers things you don't even know. It's beautiful.
Most likely the noise will have a negative effect on the length and quality of your sleep, which does have a proven negative effect on memory.
So it's probably better for you to learn while your awake and just sleep at night.