The Wall Street Journal editorial page takes about its thousandth whack at California today:
California Will Teach Kids Anything Except How to Read
Daniel Buck complains in this piece that California adopts all sorts of weird educational standards—true enough—but won't adopt a statewide requirement to use phonics in reading instruction. I'm sympathetic to this since there's a mountain of evidence suggesting that phonics and directed learning are the best ways to teach kids how to read.
Nonetheless, as I've said before, if you're going to base your op-ed on a single claim, you should at least check first to see if the claim is true. Here are California reading scores for 8th graders:
Among the 50 states, California ranks 13th in reading for white students and 9th for Black students. (But a weaker 22nd for Hispanic students.)
I too would like to see California adopt phonics guidelines, but the fact remains that California kids are fairly proficient readers compared to other states. It's just not true that California doesn't teach its children how to read.
Facts? We don't need no stinking facts!
--Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
The utter, complete idiocy of the Wall Street Journal is that its readership depends on five corporations headquartered in the nation’s most liberal regions—the Bay Area and Puget Sound—to generate the trillions of dollars of profit that props them up.
And yet they despise the people who actually make them rich beyond imagination and shriek hysterically about any city or state that doesn’t emulate West Virginia or Mississippi or Alabama—backwater shitholes that would be third-world dumps if we didn’t pay their bills.
Seriously, who *is* the WSJ audience these days? Back before Murdoch, when it was "the daily diary of the American dream," a copy of WSJ in the in-box was the badge of striving middle management. Who reads-- make that e-subscribes, I guess-- now? Law partners? Investment advisors? Techbros waiting for the right moment to exercise stock options? So much tongue-clucking over the state of blue-state affairs, combined with Robb Report-type rich-lifestyle modeling, as far as I can see. What groups of people actively want either or both? Overall, aside from people who hate-read it, or in Kevin's case maybe "bemusement-read" it, who's it for?
Or is it mainly a perk they can demand their employers pay for and then mostly ignore?
I haven’t looked at the WSJ in ages, but they used to have a very strong news organization with a focus on business. If that’s still the case, the news coverage is probably worth the price of the subscription to anyone interested in business news, and the nonsense on the editorial pages can be ignored.
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Well it's not literally true, but it's figuratively true because, you know, librul hippies something something drugs surfboards something immigrants something, and worst of all, Democrats. Ergo harrumph!
👍🏻👍🏻😀😀
As usual, the right is fine with inflexible government mandates, in this case enforcing teaching with phonics, as long as they like the mandates.
Oh, but if you did it, they'd be mad. They don't enforce it in their states.
Besides, kids probably all are being taught phonics... Except those who were taught in preschool, who'd it'd be silly to mandate teaching something they already know!
My roommate in grad school said he learned phonics, and that was why he couldn't spell well.
That's ridiculous.
Spelling and phonics are separate lessons.
Only for English speakers.
Not necessarily. I am an older baby boomer and most of us learned to read with the whole work/see and say method of the “Dick, Jane and Sally” readers. The phonics we had came later, in spelling lessons. I have never seen any evidence that there were more problems with my age group learning to read than others. There will always be a certain percentage of kids who have issues with reading and many who don’t have the proper background knowledge/vocabulary acquired outside of school to understand what they read. That is often why low income kids struggle.
People are always trashing our public schools. A big accusation from older Americans is they don’t teach civics anymore which is not true. Most states, mine included, have adopted the Common Core curriculum which has very explicit civics standards. That info is not taught all at once in a semester course in middle school or high school, but is integrated throughout the social studies curriculum. I recently asked my granddaughters what they were learning that month in social studies. Ironically both the 2nd and 4th grader had just been learning about the branches of government and both were able to give a decent explanation not only of what those are but what they do. The 4th grader naturally had more in depth info but both girls had a basic grasp of the ideas. The 4th grader studied in preparation for their their field trip to our state capitol. I was pleasantly surprised because there is no way I learned had those things in my public school at such young ages!
An editorial appeared with a somewhat hyperbolic headline? The horror!
Would be nice to see other states highlighted.
Considering that the WSJ Editorial Page has been known for decades as the cartoon section, still, it would be nice to see who occupies the rest of the charts.
He gives the source. It took me less than thirty seconds with Google to find: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/scores/?grade=8
Apparently a lot of people here are in arrears on their Google bill.
That link gives changes from the previous score for the same state, which indicates which states are improving or getting worse, but doesn't show how well the states are currently doing compared to other states.
The following link shows the score for each state, which places California right at the national average.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=2&sub=RED&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
I wasn’t able to find separate scores for black and white students, which is the data Drum graphed.
Any idea what the "DoDEA" jurisdiction happens to be?
Department of the Defense. Kids on military bases that don't have other schools.
So California has no phonics mandate. Kevin's post and the WSJ article imply that many states do have such mandates. Then if phonics is as important as Kevin and others claim, the states with mandates should be at the head of the list. Is this true? This has always been a political issue and it would be supposed that the red states should have implemented phonics mandates long ago, and consequently now be far ahead of the states that haven't.
There may well be evidence that "whole language" was a wrong turn, but by this time there should be much more evidence of the actual effect of phonics on the state scale.
As usual Kevin does not give a reference to the data and NAEP does not seem to provide raw scores in an easily accessible form.
"Then if phonics is as important as Kevin and others claim, the states with mandates should be at the head of the list."
Likewise: If the Ten Commandments being displayed and taught in classrooms is as important as the religious right claims, those states with mandates should in time be paragons of Biblical ethics, with the lowest incidence of murder, adultery, theft, and coveting thy neighbor's ass.
I"m sure the Apocalypse will come before we see that in the data.
FWIW
The data from Louisiana says any improvement would be welcome.
"Louisiana experienced the highest per-capita murder rate (16.1 per 100,000) among all U.S. states in 2022 for the 34th straight year (1989–2022), according to The 2022 FBI Uniform Crime Report."
That "whaddabout" rant out of the way, do states with phonics mandates do better on reading than those without?
That information isn't available. Mandated reading learning is state law in 38 states, tho. So I doubt you'll find anything but spurious connections.
We’ve reached the AI tipping point. The bots make stuff up and Mr. Drum reads it thinking it’s real. But it’s all just BS. It’s time to stop reading online bullshit.
Not only are CA reading scores nowhere near the bottom in the US, it appears we're actually getting more bang for the buck as well: CA ranks about 19th or 20th overall in per pupil K-12 spending. (I think Utah does the best in this regard, spending the least per capita for the highest test scores.)
Does California have any educational standards pertaining to zero-base charts?
What? You think this is a new age of reason or something?
The vast majority of people can't be reasoned with. They've been manipulated/trained/programmed to be that way for their entire lives. They just shop for what gives them the biggest brain chemical reactions at that moment, as they were trained.
As tigersharktoo alluded to, facts just diminish the rush of getting riled up.
> It's just not true that California doesn't teach its children how to read.
Well... or it means that most states don't teach kids how to read...
The Wall Street Journal editorial pages...
Well there's you problem right there. Might as well try and keep up fact checking with Fox News, it's a waste of time.
I guess teaching reading via phonics is fine for languages with phonemic style alphabets, even with the irregularities of English. But can Puthonghua be taught by phonics ? And if not, how is it taught ? I understand that teaching via Pinyin is limited.
The WSJ editorial board has been an embarrassing hack job since as long as I can remember, and it was long considered dogma that the WSJ reporters were crack ace journalists and the editorial board a joke, though whispers in recent years are the reporting side has started to slip too.
I wish you would have tagged the state names in the two charts. Who are those tail enders? Methinks I spy a tinge of Ruby......
Given the link provided by kennethalmquist you can see who the tail-enders are. There are indeed several "red" states. Along with Delaware, the District of Columbia, and New Mexico.