Is anyone left defending the thoroughly flawed system? I doubt there's very much pride wrapped up in it. The folks who invented the whole word system meant well. The biggest factor is probably the fact that there isn't a giant corporation whose quarterly profits depends on selling the materials for and teaching the flawed system for their income. Amazing that.
I'm not saying that changing the teaching method would or wouldn't help. I'm saying that something ELSE had to actively happen that caused the measured drop.
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/02/677722959/why-millions-of-kid...
>This advice to a beginning reader is based on an influential theory about reading that basically says people use things like context and visual clues to read words. The theory assumes learning to read is a natural process and that with enough exposure to text, kids will figure out how words work.
>Yet scientists from around the world have done thousands of studies on how people learn to read and have concluded that theory is wrong.
>One big takeaway from all that research is that reading is not natural; we are not wired to read from birth. People become skilled readers by learning that written text is a code for speech sounds. The primary task for a beginning reader is to crack the code. Even skilled readers rely on decoding.
>So when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, her teacher should tell her to look at all the letters in the word and decode it, based on what that child has been taught about how letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds. There should be no guessing, no "getting the gist of it."
Please apply the golden rule to your assertions and think of unintended consequences.
I don’t think people who leave school being unable to read are likely to end up with a very good life either.
My daughter's brain does not work in this way and she absolutely benefited from explicit and careful phonics instruction in school. Whole word recognition does not come naturally to her.
All of them were read to for on average an hour a day up to age 5, so thousands of hours, nothing happens "magically".
I think I can understand why phonics would be the better method of instruction for schools. It's slower, but has less variance. The "old way" of teaching was more or less telling all kids to try to copy what kids who learn to read easily do. I've seen first-hand that this doesn't work well for everyone.
One thing I do wonder about is changes in culture and home environment, alongside demographic shifts. If children are not having as many books read to them or there are fewer kids with the exposure required to bootstrap "whole word" reading, then the old "YOLO methods" (do $whatever reading activities that mainly serve to focus attention on the topic) would appear to steadily decline in effectiveness.
My observation has been that phonics as a method of instruction doesn't do much for kids who learn to read by themselves or at home. BUT - those kids don't need any help to hit educational targets. So in a "phonics only" setting the method "gets the credit" for their success despite it being tons of classroom hours that don't teach them anything except that instructional content "doesn't apply to them".
It's an interesting tradeoff because you could extend this to all areas. You could target ALL educational content towards kids who are going to naturally struggle, using "remedial" methods. I think there are strong equity arguments for this. You could argue that the purpose of school is to help everybody meet minimum standards.
An unfortunate side-effect is that schools run on this philosophy become basically daycare from the perspective of children who don't need this. They are left to do ad-hoc activities (because there is no formal content targeted to their needs) or goof off, while teachers focus all attention on kids who are struggling. I don't think this is "wrong" but I do think it's a tradeoff.
I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests.
Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!)
I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice.
Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated.
[He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...
The hope is that students will gradually learn to just recognize words by sight, which the overwhelming majority do eventually learn to do, and just need to sound out unfamiliar words. The fact that some students have struggled to learn to recognize words and need to sound most out is part of why people try to create alternatives, but those largely don't work well.
Of course, English does have some tricky phonetics. We have some words with multiple different pronunciations. We have some words with the same phonemes but different meanings that differ solely based on syllable stress. There are even some words whose pronunciation simply must be memorized, as there is no coherent rule to get from the word to the pronunciation (see for example Colonel).
alphawhisky•4mo ago
joenot443•4mo ago
I don't think the success of a literacy program is negated by the existence of crime on college campuses. I also don't think it's the fault of MS that its citizens generally produce less tax revenue than Californians or New Yorkers.
The expression is "credit where credit's due" and I'd say in this case, credit's due. Well done Mississippi.
dh2022•4mo ago
Well done Mississippi on your students' reading progress!
rayiner•4mo ago
As to equity, Mississippi is doing better for black students than almost anyone else:
> Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)
As to your other point, Mississippi receives the same amount of federal spending per person as New York: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Balance-of-P... (page 11). New York of course pays more in taxes—because it has Wall Street and Mississippi doesn’t.