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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

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]. [0]: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

istjohn 4y ago
Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.
- numeromancer 4y ago
  Homines libenter id quod volunt, credunt.
  - istjohn 4y ago
    Sapere aude
yamtaddle 4y ago
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.
- camgunz 4y ago
  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.
yowzadave 4y ago
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!
- camgunz 4y ago
  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 :)
- uptownfunk 4y ago
  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.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
> 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.
- anon291 4y ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing whole words that other people read out loud, and the best learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of the skills used to identify unfamiliar words when children progress to reading independently, but even there its not the only thing going on (context is important). > How else can you learn to read if not sounding out? Whole word recognition. That written languages have existed that are logographic rather than phonetic makes it clear that it is possible to read, and learn to read, by means other than phonics, which is only potentially useful as part of the process in phonetic languages. But even where it can be part of the process, its not the whole story.
    - pitaj 4y ago
      The podcast goes into how this is exactly wrong. For phonetic languages, kids best learn to read via phonics.
spaceprison 4y ago
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.
- camgunz 4y ago
  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.
ch4s3 4y ago
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.
- dymk 4y ago
  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.
  - numeromancer 4y ago
    They did test it: see Project Follow Through. They didn't like the results, so they ignored them.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    As the sibling comment mentions, it was tested. It got tied up in some weird politics and the George W. Bush administration was championing evidence based reading programs so teaching programs at places like Colombia took the opposite stance. Obviously that's a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.
- camgunz 4y ago
  > 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. Let's be a little more civil than this. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-phonics-to-teach-reading-is-failing-children-says-landmark-study https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
4bpp 4y ago
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/ 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.
- pfedak 4y ago
  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.
- leoc 4y ago
  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-with-science-of-reading-propaganda/ 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.
  - 4bpp 4y ago
    I would be surprised if it were (a clean split between academics and teachers). However, it seems like your link at least isn't at odds with the idea that there may be a clean split between those who seek to optimise for the declared learning outcome (reading proficiency, in this case) and those who optimise for the advancement of some political goal to which the learning outcome is at best conditionally conducive, and almost certainly secondary. (Just look at the tag collection in the sidebar.)
elzbardico 4y ago
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.
- warner25 4y ago
  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.
- camgunz 4y ago
  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.
pfedak 4y ago
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...).
- camgunz 4y ago
  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.
gnicholas 4y ago
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. 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spelling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel...

istjohn 4y ago

Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.

numeromancer 4y ago
Homines libenter id quod volunt, credunt.
- istjohn 4y ago
  Sapere aude

yamtaddle 4y ago

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.

camgunz 4y ago
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.

yowzadave 4y ago

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!

camgunz 4y ago
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 :)
uptownfunk 4y ago
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.

rahimnathwani 4y ago

> 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.

anon291 4y ago
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.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing whole words that other people read out loud, and the best learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of the skills used to identify unfamiliar words when children progress to reading independently, but even there its not the only thing going on (context is important). > How else can you learn to read if not sounding out? Whole word recognition. That written languages have existed that are logographic rather than phonetic makes it clear that it is possible to read, and learn to read, by means other than phonics, which is only potentially useful as part of the process in phonetic languages. But even where it can be part of the process, its not the whole story.
  - pitaj 4y ago
    The podcast goes into how this is exactly wrong. For phonetic languages, kids best learn to read via phonics.

spaceprison 4y ago

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.

camgunz 4y ago
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.

ch4s3 4y ago

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.

dymk 4y ago
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.
- numeromancer 4y ago
  They did test it: see Project Follow Through. They didn't like the results, so they ignored them.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  As the sibling comment mentions, it was tested. It got tied up in some weird politics and the George W. Bush administration was championing evidence based reading programs so teaching programs at places like Colombia took the opposite stance. Obviously that's a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.
camgunz 4y ago
> 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. Let's be a little more civil than this. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-phonics-to-teach-reading-is-failing-children-says-landmark-study https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

4bpp 4y ago

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/ 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.

pfedak 4y ago
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.
leoc 4y ago
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-with-science-of-reading-propaganda/ 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.
- 4bpp 4y ago
  I would be surprised if it were (a clean split between academics and teachers). However, it seems like your link at least isn't at odds with the idea that there may be a clean split between those who seek to optimise for the declared learning outcome (reading proficiency, in this case) and those who optimise for the advancement of some political goal to which the learning outcome is at best conditionally conducive, and almost certainly secondary. (Just look at the tag collection in the sidebar.)

elzbardico 4y ago

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.

warner25 4y ago
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.
camgunz 4y ago
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.

pfedak 4y ago

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...).

camgunz 4y ago
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.

gnicholas 4y ago

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. 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spelling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel...