John McWhorter says we should quit arguing about how to teach reading and just accept that we already know perfectly well how to do it:
In a word, phonics....Phonics works better for more children. Project Follow Through, a huge investigation in the late 1960s led by education scholar Siegfried Englemann, taught 75,000 children via the phonics-based Direct Instruction method from kindergarten through third grade at 10 sites nationwide. The results were polio-vaccine-level dramatic. At all 10 sites, 4-year-olds were reading like 8-year-olds, for example.
....However, there is a persistent disconnect between the world of reading science and the world of people teaching children to read. Only 15 percent of programs training elementary-school teachers include actual instruction on how to teach children to read. There remain people who favor the whole word method, or a combination of whole word and phonics, or even no particular “method” at all.
There's a wealth of research that confirms this, but unfortunately reading instruction has become part of the culture wars, with conservatives taking the side of phonics while university education departments tend to favor other methods.
This is unfortunate. Phonics works, and to the extent that you can invent add-ons that are potentially a little bit better it's really not worth the effort. DI-based phonics instruction is so good that we'd be a lot better off simply making it universal since it works well with both poor and affluent children. In addition:
There is a racial angle to this....We have known how to teach Black children, including poor ones, how to read since the Johnson administration: the Direct Instruction method of phonics. In this case, Black children don’t need special materials; districts need incur no extra expenses in purchasing such things. I consider getting Direct Instruction to every Black child in the country a key plank of three in turning the corner on race in America (the other two are ending the War on Drugs and sharply increasing funding and cultural support to vocational education).
Liberals should get on this train. Stop resisting just because conservatives have been pushing this for decades. In this case, they're right.
They were teaching phonics into the 1960s. What happened? They also stopped teaching grammar at some point. I suppose its like economics. Some powerful figure in the field gets a bee in his or her bonnet and has enough power to impose it even if it is demonstrably awful.
This is a rare case in which the conservatives got it right and the liberals got it wrong, and as a result there has been a consistent bias against phonics because it is associated with the otherwise odious program of the Republican Party and the right.
But I fully agree that we need to get over it and start using the teaching method that worked for many of us boomers and works today.
Also, bring back sentence diagramming. I spent countless hours in school diagramming sentences and it's the primary reason why I in my career I could always write so much better than the younger ones. I knew how to construct a sentence and they didn't.
Judging by Boomers’ postings on social media, their ability to read and write well is not one that should be assumed.
How do you know which posters on social media are boomers?
I LOVED diagramming. (Confessions of a grammar geek)
I did too, actually. I was quite good at it, particularly enjoying diagramming complex sentences. Looking back (and I'm not sure I was conscious of this at the time), I got much the same please from diagramming as from working out equations and such like.
I always noted the same people who were good at grammar were good at math.
Citation not included?
I learned more grammar while taking Spanish than I ever learned in English classes. One of the problems with phonics is we don't have phonic spelling.
My late wife told me of one of her classes where the book taught how to speak with a southern accent. Phonics and a Joysie Accent???
They were teaching phonics in the 50's too. We learned to sound out the word. What a concept. Oh, and take a look at baby boomers from the time period. We all learned how to read. It was the expectation that every last one of us would be reading by the time we left 3rd great.
Which brings me to another point. We are expected to be able to learn the basics in school. Basic reading and arithmetic are essential to all others classes. Can't read, forget about history. Oh, and we were expected to know how to memorize many things. The times tables, the states and capitols of the USA. And, because they we were expected to learn this information, we expected ourselves to learn it too.
*grade
*capitals
“And, because they we were expected to learn this information, we expected ourselves to learn it too.”
They we were, eh?
That horse appears quite high based on the “results” you’re demonstrating.
Thanks for pointing out the lack of edit here. Appreciate that.
Horse?
You really don't want to hear anything that might go against whatever notion of the facts you already have.
Again, thanks so much. Really.
High drop out rates in the 50's and 60's. Your point is dead.
The issue was with whole word learning. It seemed like a good idea, as this is how fluent readers do it. It turns out that reading phonetically is a necessarily intermediate step in learning to read fluently.
Teaching grammar has nothing to do with this. Grammar was dropped from the curriculum because all the evidence pointed to its not helping. This has not changed. It get it. Diagramming sentences is fun, in a puzzle-solving way for certain people. I am one of those people. But teaching it in school would be like teaching sudoku. You could construct an argument for sudoku as teaching logic. Some kids would love it. Others would regard it as pointless drudgery. The argument for benefits accrued would be tenuous at best. Then there is the eternal matter of opportunity cost. If we were to collectively decide to teach sentence diagramming, what are we dropping from the curriculum to make room?
Kids need to be taught lots of things. Lots of things are only taught in a cursory manner to find out what kids are good at, enjoy doing, and will take up more quickly.
Grammar is essential to being understood in the broader world. But it's an advanced skill that maybe most people don't need to know deeply. Unless they're writing instruction books, video games, programming, writing science papers...
"Liberals should get on this train. Stop resisting just because conservatives have been pushing this for decades. In this case, they're right."
Oh yeah - that's gonna happen.
Too much dialectical nonsense in this post. Phonics was a joke by 1990. Cultures create reading. You don't teach it. It's inherited by your activity in the tribe.
Oh, oh, Kevin has missed a huge step. We don't want to teach folks to read then they will become educated and uppity and want to vote. They will be able to understand the political lies and use critical thinking skills. Never, we cannot let the folks of colour know how to read. Never I say.
Rather pathetic isn't it.
This post represents the problem. The "people of color" can already read. Your whole data subset of globalization is the problem. When capitalism liquidates, the party is over for this kind of elitist thinking. Markets will die, nations will dissolve. Education will be tribal and inherited. The tribes that can communicate the best will achieve. The ones that can't .........
Don't sit around waiting for Capitalism to liquidate. It will outlast both of us.
Yes!!! Look what Johannes Gutenberg released on the world. How many years, decades of religious wars happened after folks could read the Bible.
They're not actually reading the bible.
No special materials? No extra expenses? No gonna happen…
I don't object to phonics and think that's as good a way as any to teach reading. But it's worth remembering three things:
1) most kids learn to decode no matter which way they are taught.
2) the kids who don't learn to decode *need* phonics
3) decoding has nothing to do with content knowledge, which is essential to longterm reading ability, and most studies show the gap is in knowledge, not decoding.
I've read Engelmann's books. He said many times that black kids took (on average) much longer, often two or three times longer, to master the material. And Engelmann's method required you to master material before moving on (ie, tracking, ability grouping). Engelmann also believed you could take any subject and break it down into tiny parts, teach it, and anyone could master it--which is manifestly false. His documented successes were mostly in early grades.
So the fact that most teachers aren't taught the specifics of reading instruction in ed schools is almost entirely irrelevant. In fact, you should completely ignore any cite about what ed schools teach (especially if they are from the grotesque NCTQ foundation), because they basically went around and collected curriculum listings, which is an insanely stupid way to do it. Most elementary school teachers are working in classrooms where phonics are taught, and teaching phonics via curriculum is something that most classrooms do, so even if they are completely ignorant of phonics the curriculum is not.
Most schools have reading experts, and most kids with reading problems get "pulled out" for specialized training in the early years.
We do this already. McWhorter is just wrong and basically ignorant on this, but there are a bunch of idiots who go around talking about how teaching reading will end or mitigate the achievement gap. It won't. Sorry. Could we do better? Sure. Have at it.
But the things that have a real shot at improving the achievement gap are very unlikely to take place. First, sort kids by ability. Second, teach them vocabulary directly and frequently (which is the big missing gap, not phonics). Third, accept that some kids will still struggle with reading and need more intensive supports all their lives, that these kids will generally have lower IQs, and the racial sorts will make people uncomfortable.
Ain't no quick fix to education--and I know Kevin knows this. I'm just saying that the idea that liberals are preventing phonics is just not borne out by reality in most schools.
My kid's elementary school which is a title school that also has the kids of surgeons from the big hospital down the street is thick with specialist reading and math intervention teachers. I think there are 12 classroom teachers and 5 intervention teachers who give about 1:4 instruction to those who are struggling with something.
I don't know what buzzwords their lessons are festooned with though.
I am quite sure that the red counties and states are not blowing the blue ones away on reading scores, however.
Which would seem to be an expected outcome from this particular ideological miracle cure story.
My mother taught grade school for years, mostly in the lower grades, and ended up teaching remedial reading to junior high kids reading at a third grade level. She was often successful with poor readers, and expressed opinions very close to educationrealist. She also thought that whole word or "look see" was helpful with some children, but that most children did learn to read as edrealist said, by osmosis or absorption or being at the developmental stage where they could. She was just in the classroom while it happened. Also noted the paucity of vocabulary in problem readers. Now my daughter who teaches fifth grade says that as well. Many of her students come from Spanish speaking homes, but their Spanish vocabulary is not so hot either.
It would better for KD to further explain the issue. He merely grabs a headline and regurgitates, no analysis, no explanation. First the study in question does not seem to have a counter so we can have from problems from confirmation bias to overmotivated individuals. Second, though the debate has historically being framed as phonics vs whole language, the fact is that they various manners of phonics, so which works which doesn’t, no clarification is provided. Finally in the US and most of the English speaking countries, a majority of students already use some form of phonics!!! And yet overall test results are where there are- there was no magical cure. Finally there are reasons on some places where a type of phonics are not taught, sometimes those reasons have to do with training, resources, etc., but sometimes those reasons are legitimate and have to do more with the students. Basically what we have here is as if Fox News had kidnapped KD brain: go for the headline, report later (never).
I've never once thought about this topic before so I have to wonder what the real story behind conservative backing of phonics is.
Back then, in the 60's, conservatives were not Taliban terrorists.
They were simply more easily able to hide it.
I recall an article in the Economist along these lines ("American schools teach reading all wrong"), which said that teaching reading is one thing Mississippi does well.
If teaching reading is the one thing Mississippi does well it doesn't seem to have much effect.
So. Phonics are 'conservative' and not phonics is 'liberal' and phonics work way better.
Therefore conservative areas have much higher reading scores.
Right?
Right?
Oooooooo noooooooo.....
Reading scores are almost certainly following the same racial patterns as other test scores, so race rather than politics predicts outcomes. (not causes, just predicts.)
>>Reading scores are almost certainly following the same racial patterns as other test scores<<
This is a very bad way to put it. Try "socioeconomic status patterns." It's true that race/ethnicity correlate with SES in America, but the way you've phrased it makes it sound as if you believe reading ability is determined by group genetics.
Funny, I know. But decoding printed words and reading comprehension are not the same thing.
Agree. Said so above, in fact.
Kevin seems to have been taken in again by an extremist, who claims things like "4-year-olds were reading like 8-year-olds, for example". Really? If that were true on average it would be a very simple matter to bring lower-performing demographics up to par but this has not happened in real life. Project Follow Through seems to have shown mainly that structured reading programs worked better than unstructured ones, not so much that phonics in particular is the magic ingredient that can get all kids to read.
If phonetics is so critical to reading, why are reading scores for China, where the language is not phonetic at all, better than those for Spain, where the language is almost perfectly phonetic?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pisa-test-score-mean-performance-on-the-reading-scale?tab=table
Some extreme methods like strict Whole Language may have been discredited but it has certainly not been shown that there is a magical "phonics" method that will remove the real-life barriers to learning that result, for example, in the persistent white/black gap. Other things than school instruction are involved in these differences. The insistence on phonics appears to be partly a tactic to further privatization of schools.
The insistence on phonics appears to be partly a tactic to further privatization of schools.
Bingo. It's a bogeyman conservative educators and politicians use to get parents to yank their kids out of public schools: "They won't learn to read because the teachers in this elementary school use this hippy-dippy reading theory that doesn't work and promotes the gay agenda" (or whatever).
Gay agenda is private schools
Why do we have bigots here?
How would phonics help a language not written in phonetical alphabet?
That seems like a terrible argument.
And reading is more difficult to teach in a symbolic language... but there's a reason that their symbols are not arbitrary and have a set size.
I don't get McWhorter's argument. Teaching reading via phonics is pretty standard all over the country these days. The old phonics-vs-whole language debate is very 70s. Are there seriously still any "no-phonics" school districts out there?
McWhorter says that only 15 percent of teacher training programs actually include instruction on how to teach reading, so I guess few teachers are being indoctrinated in some crazy liberal non-phonetic methods. Most likely they just use common sense and teach kids to spell out words if they don't recognize them.
And is whole language taught in black schools and phonics in white schools? If not there must be some other reason than instruction methods that there is a gap. We actually know that income level is a major factor even within racial groups.
I think over the years inner city schools have tried a lot of ways to try to close the achievement gap, which, as I suggested above, has been spun by a lot of public education critics as "abandoning basic phonics." These innovations rarely show results because, as you note, socio-economic privilege remains stubbornly the single main determinant factor in academic success. Want a kid to read well? Have them come from a two-parent, upper-income, college-educated household.
I think that McWhorter has chosen his straw man carefully. Who knows what elementary reading curricula are most widely used? As it turns out, grades 1-2 use something called Units of Study, which has been widely criticized. The other top curricula deviate from recommended practices, too. See https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-most-popular-reading-programs-arent-backed-by-science/2019/12
The point here is not that pointy-headed liberals have got it wrong, but that "Phonics is “buried” in many commercial reading programs, Seidenberg said. Teachers might be able to use what’s there to construct a coherent sequence, he said, or they might not."
Elementary school teachers teach the curricula they're given, for the most part; IME elementary school teachers are the least likely of any group of educators to exercise independent thinking. The problem lies with the publishers and the educational establishment that buys their materials.
Finally, let's recognize that lots of kids, and especially Black and Latino kids don't speak standard English. And kids who do speak standard English have a huge jump on decoding printed text. Try reading dialect some time to get a sense of what they go through. You can start with some poems by Robert Burns.
if there's some librul eleet anti-phonics agenda, i sure haven't heard about it. is there actually evidence to back that up?
Agree completely. I'm a leftie and I am not nor have I ever heard of anyone who is anti-phonics.
You mean pointy headed conservatives. The "whole approaches" are basically organic driven unschooling, which the public school system was based on in the 19th century. If most Republican voters who whine over the public school system, would educate themselves, they would realize starting in the 80's it has been gradually changed to fit elitist and corporate expectations. Aka, its left the real mission.
My mother hated phonic. I learned by experience. I mostly self taught. I used the Phonix book as fire kindle.
I know of the arguments, but I have never seen it as liberal.
Conservatives are always the ones pushing nutty learning stuff out here.
Anecdotal observations/conclusions from 15 years of teaching in Los Angeles high schools and middle schools.
There are no silver bullet solutions. Anyone claiming they have one is either selling something to school districts or pushing a political agenda.
At the core of every conservative's argument about education is the belief that there was some golden age in the past -usually when the conservative was in school - when the teaching method they support "worked" and everybody learned. This is bullshit. The high school dropout rate in 1960 was over 25%. Our public education system never tried to educate everyone to be "college & career ready" until very recently. And we are in the very early years of trying to measure how well we are doing.
By the time students get to high school, they are pretty set on their reading habits and their attitude toward reading. It takes a lot of one on one to make any progress and even then, who knows how long it lasts. We teachers just do not have the time to do that with 110-140 students.
Not a silver bullet, but a major factor in my view is that students don't do enough reading outside of school. If students not good at something, they have to do it a lot to get better. And by a lot I mean a lot more than they want to. It's a touchy thing for a teacher because if you give them too much, they just quit.
"The high school dropout rate in 1960 was over 25%. Our public education system never tried to educate everyone to be "college & career ready" until very recently. And we are in the very early years of trying to measure how well we are doing."
Because back even if you dropped out of high school there were unskilled jobs waiting for you to enter the workforce in. It wasn't considered a big deal at the time.
I agree with the folks who have said the issue is complicated. Phonics isn't the one true answer to raising good readers. I firmly believe that different children learn to read differently. I picked up reading by watching Sesame Street and Electric Company plus my older brother reading to me as a trick to help him become better reader. I really don't remember not being able to read, I think I might have been 3 years old when I began reading road signs out loud to my family on a road trip.
On the other hand spelling and phonics were difficult for me, I suspect I have some sort of form of dyslexia, also penmanship was hard but then again 1970s Catholic School demanded perfection and I just wasn't going to be that person.
Both my kids, now in middle school, were fluent readers before entering kindergarten. My understanding from talking to their teachers is that this is not uncommon. There typically are a couple of kids like this in any given class. So how did they learn this? Partly the classic method of parents reading books to them combined with encouragement to do it themselves. Beyond that, PBS Kids. Not so much Sesame Street, but Word World, which explicitly teaches phonics in a surprisingly entertaining (and Neo-Platonic) way.
Reading comprehension, please. Right at the beginning, "Phonics works better for more children". I learned reading with Dick and Jane--the "look-see" method. My brother and my daughter have dyslexia. They needed to learn with phonics. But not having dyslexia, I could have still learned with phonics. btw, Direct Instruction is not the only phonics teaching method. Orton-Gillingham and Open Court are other phonics-based programs. I took some classes at a state college in the past few years. They did not teach phonics or any other reading method. I asked why, and they said that each school system had a curriculum, which the teacher would have to follow. I asked a recent college grad with a degree in special ed if she had learned about teaching phonics, and she said no. Special Ed is often know for doing more of what didn't work.
Hooked on Phonics anyone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJNB8TrNawo
Phonics is by no means a magic bullet. That was the teaching method sixty years ago when I was in grade one, and some of my classmates learned to read well and some did not. The various other methods were initially invented as a supplement to phonics, for the benefit of kids for whom phonics did not work. Replacing phonics came later; none of the other methods worked for every kid either, but education professionals continued to seek methods, in many subjects other than reading as well, that were universally applicable so that one teacher could teach a whole classroom full of kids from one lesson plan. "Different methods for different kids" just demands more resources than most schools have available.
Agree with every word and would add, "more resources than any taxpayers want to pay for."
Broad brush, I know, but taxpayers generally do not care about the education of children other than their own.
I don't believe that " taxpayers generally do not care about the education of children other than their own". I do believe that there is a divide between short-term thinkers, who can see only the immediate cost, and long-term thinkers, who can see the eventual benefit of educating every kid. My impression is that conservatives tend to be more on the short term side while liberals are more likely to see the long term, but that is by no means universal.
Conservatives can't see any further than length of their arms, which are usually holding a mirror.
When I say they do not care, I mean they do not do anything about it. Plenty of people have feelings about education.
As a 59 something person with no school age relatives I care about, this is not an issue I concern myself with.
I believe I was taught phonics back in the 1970s and I can read today.
These endless debates about how to teach stuff are tedious. Teach your own damn kids if you don’t like the way it’s done. Tedious.
I’m not 59. I’m 50 something. My iPad doesn’t like me.
I remember when I first started to learn to read. The first lesson was when my uncle told me what that long word I see on every gas station was. Lubrication.
Huh. I didn't know this was a left vs. right thing. And I really had no idea the right was on the side of phonics. I learned using phonics, and I was an advanced reader all through school and college. As an adult I'm totally sold on the method for teaching kids. I knew it was out of favor these days, but I didn't know it was for (the usual) bullshit political reasons. Where is the battle taking place? I'll be happy to go there and make the case, FWIW.
Are there many schools not teaching phonics? It seems that today it's more a fight between the phonics-only crowd and the there-are-a-handful-of-sight-words crowd. But you really can't get around the handful of high frequency oddball words in English (were, was, said, etc).
The phonics wars don't deal with the problem of content knowledge, which is what really matters by third grade. I spent several years reading with 1st graders and you could always tell pretty fast who was going to have a hard time learning to read by whether or not they could identify a giraffe from a picture. Giraffes are in this weird space where they are frequently found in children's books and high quality children's programming (like PBS kids shows), but not popular enough to be absolutely everywhere. If you don't know what a giraffe is by the time you are six, it is a major sign that you have had very few books read to you. Kids who don't know what a giraffe is also don't know what many other things are, which makes reading comprehension extremely difficult.
When I was a boy every kid knew reading, 'riting and arithmetic. None of this fancy new math. Geography, too- real places like Bechuanaland and Bombay- none of your liberal Botswana and Mumbai. We could test the tubes in our TV at the drugstore too- can kids these days do that? Excuse me, I have to get my 25-year-old son to figure out something on this danged computer again.
Shorter- Kevin goes full "guy at the end of the bar."
Heehee!
I would add common core as the same as phonic. It's a conservative elitist thinking that when conservative voters whined about it a decade ago, didn't realize they agreed with the left wing........whoops.
When all posts agree you can raise the flag. The liberals, to the extent that’s even true, never stop trying to improve overall education. Conservatives only care about their kids education.
I can’t believe Kevin fell for this one. What is needed is not, as some posters have already said, a better theory, what’s needed is resources per kid that society is not willing to find.
One of my kids has a serious learning disability (bottom 4% in aural comprehension) and one other kid is gifted by any measure (missed two questions on SAT math).
The sheer amount of additional, non school hours required by the kid with the disability to stay anywhere near even with his peers would disabuse anyone of the notion that one theory is “better.”
I don't know, I just learned to read at home. I loved when my parents would read to me, and they enjoyed it too, and as they would read from one of my books I think I would point to a word and ask, "What's that word?" and they would pronounce it to me. I guess I picked up the pronunciation rules of English (and many of the thousands of exceptions to those rules - through/tough/cough, anyone?) before I started kindergarten. As a result, my kindergarten teacher had me reading to the class (child labor! and unpaid!). By the summer after 2nd grade I was reading car-nerd magazines, and figuring out the meanings of words from context if I was too lazy to go to the dictionary. I surprised my first optometrist during 3rd grade (Yeah, I wore glasses when I was 9. Wanna make something of it?) when I said the first line I couldn't read was unintelligible, and told him correctly what it meant when he asked whether I knew. Not saying I'm some kind of super genius, because I'm not. There are a lot of people out there with more native intelligence than I have (or else I'm just lazy, which I will cop to). Pretty much any physicist, for example.
I'm not sure what any of this means for learning to read. Maybe it was just some kid who wanted to learn how these strange squiggles on the page related to words I knew and wanted to learn new stuff, or maybe it was phonics, or maybe it was something else entirely. Yeah, I was a dweeb, what can I say?
I'm a supporter of phonics but we should be aware that, unfortunately, English has variable spell-sound rules because it's a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, and Greek. It's the source of confusion for youngsters: "Why isn't 'of' spelled with a 'v'?
Also, Modern English begins around the time of the printing press, which froze spelling around the time the Great Vowel Shift, disassociating spellings from pronunciations.
I think it's these obstacles which get people to think "There's got to be a better way" than phonics. Hence, the alternatives you read about.
I think phonics, though, can be instrumental in getting kids started reading.* But sure, things get more complex than that quickly in English.
*And ideally, if they enjoy reading, they should self-improve rapidly through frequent practice. At least that's how it worked for me. But I grew up before video games and iPads.
Hah!
The real better way: fix English.
I recall reading a famous book on written language (the name escapes me). It discussed the written...um Navajo? Maybe... language. Has 47 characters or something, exactly one per phoneme. Supposed to be considerably easier for kids to learn.
How did it ever become a political issue in the first place? Teacher unions?
I can see how tax policy, say, or gun regulations might be viewed though a political lens. But methods of teaching reading?
It became an issue because of the conservative desire to privatize schools. It is similar to Critical Race Theory - an issue to fire up the base. All those people who think they know that Phonics is the miracle cure don't really have enough knowledge of the issue to judge, but they know what the party line is.
Ah so that is why the republicans are pushing CRT - Critical Reading Theory
Truth be told, as a boomer reading has provided me with a lifetime of joy.
But English is a really bizarre language from what I have been told by people who are bi and multi lingual. This is from both a grammatical and linguistic standpoint.
I wouldn't even begin to think about diagramming a sentence these days.
But reading is a SKILL that needs practice and we have done all we can with technology to make people not want to practice that skill
The excessive use of acronyms - trying to convey a message in 280 characters type of stuff just really reduces the need to understand text down to as little as possible
Even Kevin Drum is doing his best to destroy English by using Word Press as the platform with no editing functions available to us
You hit "post comment" and pray you don't appear to be an idiot by what you thought you wrote.
Especially if the spell checker "improved" your spelling...
az-
Hell, the color combo on what I'm typing with my old eyes?
I can hardly see it.
I hit post comment and voila !! black & white and contrasted enough so that these tired old eyes can read
Normally I read my own comment after I post and say to myself "Damn, if anyone responds to that they must be crazy......"
I absolutely despise acronyms and random abbreviations.
FGDABDIT
I can't even fathom what most of them mean and have to stop reading and puzzle it out.