> With that systems, she said, they never had anyone fail. Every child that passed through learnt reading. She said it was like a miracle. From someone familia

> With that systems, she said, they never had anyone fail. Every child that passed through learnt reading. She said it was like a miracle. From someone familiar with the trenches of teaching: claims of 100% success need to be met with skepticism. There could be other classes where the lower performing children go (and fail). There is actually a lot of research on how to teach reading. I'm not saying every school district uses research-supported materials, but I am saying nostalgia for decades-gone-by methods of teaching should be looked at with a (very) critical eye. Who is successful? Who is not? Are there alternative approaches for students for whom the main approach does not work? On this specific claim: VPK = voluntary pre-kindergarten. Presumably this teacher is not claiming that 100% of children are learning to read before kindergarten? To critically evaluate this claim, one would have to know the grade level being taught. If they were teaching introductory reading to 7-8 year olds (instead of typical US kindergarten ~5 years old), then success rates would be higher... And in fact one of the trends in education has been pushing the skills to lower grade levels, where they (of course?) become more difficult to master - which makes these claims plausible but again, you need to know if you are comparing the performance of 2nd graders from decades ago with kindergarteners now.