6 ms·

Why did they drop phonics in the first place?

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
It looks like based on the article it was more like schools had more flexibility in choosing how they would teach their students to read, and individual schools chose to drop phonics. This change would force schools to choose from a select set of teaching materials, all of which would include phonics. (But, if the school already has a literacy rate above a certain threshold, they can apply to be exempt). Idk this just seems sensible?
- tsukikage 3y ago
  The problem with the "don't actually try to read; instead, guess what the word might be based on things other than the actual letters it's actually composed of" approach is... it doesn't teach kids to read. It does, however, teach kids to skim and guess and parrot, which, given a bit of coaching and upfront memorisation, is perfectly sufficient for passing a literacy test by rote despite, in fact, being unable to actually read. So we end up with perverse incentives for the school and kids with unfortunate gaps in their life skills.
steanne 3y ago
here's a good long article on it https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-... ah, linked and discussed previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600
- Akronymus 3y ago
  > Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. Yes, as you become a better reading, the individual letters don't really matter anymore, as it starts being parsed without effort. It is NOT, however, viable for new readers. Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners?
  - cnity 3y ago
    Right? Like trying to teach a baby to run, because it's a faster way of getting around.
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    > Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners? Someone called Marie Clay, who apparently has something of a celebrity status among teachers [1]. My assessment is that her heart is definitely in the right place, but her rational brain didn't cover itself with glory here. As the old German saying goes: with the heart you can move mountains, but without the brain, it's easy to put them in the wrong place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay
    - williamcotton 3y ago
      Since the modern era began we have mainly focused on figuring out where to put these mountains and not at all why we would want to move them in the first place. We are too practical for something as Enlightened as republican democracy.
    - Akronymus 3y ago
      > In response, several international Reading Recovery affiliated institutions released a statement listing Clay's various awards as proof of the efficacy of her theory Did they seriously do an appeal to authority when dealing with childrens education?
      - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
        "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM."
      - red_admiral 3y ago
        Yes. That is the state of a lot of education policy, I'm afraid.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  What I find most incredible of these methods is their insistence on pictures, pictures, pictures! Take cues from the pictures!. I recently listened to the "Sold a Story" podcast, which takes a strong stance against these cueing methodologies, but I felt constant frustration that nobody ever seemed to point out that not every text has accompanying pictures! How do the believers in cueing methods expect a kid to read a headline? Or a sign? Or this very comment?
gregwebs 3y ago
Some students still struggle to learn reading in a phonics-based reading environment. Teachers or those with influence over the curriculum get sold on some other program that they are told is going to make things better, and it might for a few students, but as explained here, it’s not evidence-based that it’s going to be better for everyone. A friend of mine lives in a well off school district that adopted a non-phonics approach. Her child was falling behind in reading, so she had to teach her phonics at home and then she caught up. She wasn’t happy that she had to do the school’s job for them.
- Akronymus 3y ago
  > Some students still struggle to learn reading in a phonics-based reading environment. That is to be expected. But as it turns out, the alternative is holding most people back, instead of helping the ones who struggle.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >She wasn’t happy that she had to do the school’s job for them. Imagine not getting pleasure from helping your child learn to read.
  - okeuro49 3y ago
    > Imagine not getting pleasure from helping your child learn to read. Bizarre reply given the full context of the comment.
    - lynx23 3y ago
      Is calling out parents who apparently fell for the "we will care for your child, so you can go to work and dont be bothered" meme really so bizarre? I disagree. It is actually high time to do this more!
  - civilized 3y ago
    ...where to begin. It's really frustrating when your kid goes to a place all day where their most important job, by far, is to teach the kid to read, and they fail to do it, and you have to pick up the pieces. A parent who has the time, energy, and skill to teach their child to read after work is blessed. Same goes for the kid - sometimes kids come home tired after school and don't want to be subjected to more learning activities! I say this as a parent who has spent a lot of energy teaching both of my kids to read. The younger one has been much harder than the other. And I am just praying that what the school is doing is working, because it's a struggle to get her to spend even more time sitting and focused on page after page of black and white. I've seen some of the school materials and they are phonics-based, so I think it's on the right track, but a lot depends on the teacher. A couple months ago I went to a parent teacher conference for her where the teacher talked as if she could be sure the little one would be fine, because she'd taught her brother who got concepts very quickly. And I had to explain that actually no, the little one isn't the same, she isn't anywhere near where her brother was at that age, and I laid out the specifics. I did manage to get the teacher to make a bit of a surprised face and take some notes about it. People sometimes romanticize the experience of having children too much. In reality it can be a struggle with no assurance that things are going to be okay. And the guilt of leaving your child struggling with an essential life skill feels like sinking to the bottom of the ocean. My little one is currently very young but if she continues to lag, who knows what I will do? I might have to destroy my work schedule to home school her. I love my job and it brings in truckloads of money for the family, but am I going to spend all my time on that and let my kid be failed by the people I pay to help her? Not a chance.
red_admiral 3y ago
There is a genuinely held belief among many educators that if, instead of making children do boring repetetive things like decoding and chanting syllables (or learning times tables), teachers just took a step back and let childrens' magical inner light shine, they would pick up the skills they need as they go along and be much happier on top of that. For more details on this, and the people and companies involved in the phonics situation specifically, I can recommend the free podcast "sold a story" [1] (or its transcript, if you learnt to read back when phonics were in fashion). The tragedy here is that people were genuinely trying to do good, followed an approach that felt compassionate and humane, and there were even a couple of small studies backing them up. And there are a minority of children (more often than not from well-to-do households) who do indeed pick up reading without any formal instruction in phonics; trying to replicate their experience for everyone else too seems like a virtuous project. The problem is that, according to a lot of substantial scientific research, this no-phonics approach simply does not work for a majority of children, and leaves them functionally illiterate - that or your parents, if they notice and afford it, hire a private reading tutor so the effect of no-phonics reading instruction in schools is actually to widen rather than narrow demographic gaps in reading. [1] https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
- rayiner 3y ago
  > The tragedy here is that people were genuinely trying to do good, followed an approach that felt compassionate and humane I don’t think this assigns sufficient fault to the teachers. Being insufficiently skeptical of newfangled approaches to something fundamental like how to teach kids to read is blameworthy.
  - civilized 3y ago
    For decades! And ignoring decades of direct experience of it not working!
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    Personally, I would say there's a lot of blame to go around but around 0% of that should fall on the median teacher. In a lot of places, teachers' jobs are in practice to keep up with implementing the endless flood of initiatives and programmes and innovations meant to make things better, often written by people who have no clue. The median teacher will discover quite soon that any criticism of the latest guidelines coming down from above is not welcome. It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors. In the UK, a case recently made the headlines where a head teacher ended their own life after Ofsted (the government's office for education) downgraded their school's rating. Schools are in the game of guessing what they think Ofsted will like as much as some students are in the game of guessing what they think their teacher will like to read in their essay to get an A, and it certainly seems like schools demonstrating enthusiasm in implementing the latest Ofsted initiatives is part of the whole circus. The median teacher is on the receiving end of both the government's initiatives and their head teacher's ideas on how to implement them; if they use whole-language instruction because that's what Big Brother has made this week's doctrine then I'd allocate the blame 100% to the people with actual structural power in this situation. (There is a whole book on this, Teach Like Nobody's Watching by Mark Enser, trying to encourage teachers to go outside the box of "what will look good on the next Ofsted inspection" where they are given the leeway to do this by their head teachers.) Although phonics has many studies behind it showing that it works better than whole-language, to the extent that I strongly support teaching phonics, you'll note that part of the original topic title is "NY is Forcing Schools to ...". That's how orders come down to teachers in the real world, so it seems unfair to blame teachers too much for the results.
ermir 3y ago
It’s because of the influence of the Marxist Paolo Freire whose techniques and outlook are the dominant ones in the teaching colleges. He specifically hated phonics since it’s only used for rote and mechanical reading, which is a tool to make the reader useful in capitalism. Instead, he advocated for political and revolutionary techniques to awaken “critical consciousness” or “conscientize” the reader into being a revolutionary.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Although just about every "progressive" educator in the UK/US I've heard or read will cite Freire glowingly, I think we're reading far more into him than is actually there. He very much did advocate for critical consciousness and awakening revolutionary potential, but he is (to use Egan's three-aspect model of academic, developmental and social goals of education) much more on the social than the developmental side of things - the two are not the same! Freire is not so much about every student reaching their own innate potential without "spoiling" them through external pressure, but about molding students to a Marxist view of progress through sufficent application of external pressure. One can disagree with both these approaches while still recognizing that the two are very different things. The same problem exists to some extent with Marx himself, whether or not you agree with Marxism (I don't), I'm with Freddie deBoer that Marxism is a MATERIALIST not a SPIRITUAL movement; Marx does not want workers to "feel valued" while laboring for their capitalist overlords, he wants them to own the means of production! Some of the "Marxists" in today's university social justice circles would do well to notice that.

It looks like based on the article it was more like schools had more flexibility in choosing how they would teach their students to read, and individual schools chose to drop phonics. This change would force schools to choose from a select set of teaching materials, all of which would include phonics. (But, if the school already has a literacy rate above a certain threshold, they can apply to be exempt). Idk this just seems sensible?

tsukikage 3y ago
The problem with the "don't actually try to read; instead, guess what the word might be based on things other than the actual letters it's actually composed of" approach is... it doesn't teach kids to read. It does, however, teach kids to skim and guess and parrot, which, given a bit of coaching and upfront memorisation, is perfectly sufficient for passing a literacy test by rote despite, in fact, being unable to actually read. So we end up with perverse incentives for the school and kids with unfortunate gaps in their life skills.

steanne 3y ago

here's a good long article on it https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-... ah, linked and discussed previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600

Akronymus 3y ago
> Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. Yes, as you become a better reading, the individual letters don't really matter anymore, as it starts being parsed without effort. It is NOT, however, viable for new readers. Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners?
- cnity 3y ago
  Right? Like trying to teach a baby to run, because it's a faster way of getting around.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  > Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners? Someone called Marie Clay, who apparently has something of a celebrity status among teachers [1]. My assessment is that her heart is definitely in the right place, but her rational brain didn't cover itself with glory here. As the old German saying goes: with the heart you can move mountains, but without the brain, it's easy to put them in the wrong place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Since the modern era began we have mainly focused on figuring out where to put these mountains and not at all why we would want to move them in the first place. We are too practical for something as Enlightened as republican democracy.
  - Akronymus 3y ago
    > In response, several international Reading Recovery affiliated institutions released a statement listing Clay's various awards as proof of the efficacy of her theory Did they seriously do an appeal to authority when dealing with childrens education?
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM."
    - red_admiral 3y ago
      Yes. That is the state of a lot of education policy, I'm afraid.
Mordisquitos 3y ago
What I find most incredible of these methods is their insistence on pictures, pictures, pictures! Take cues from the pictures!. I recently listened to the "Sold a Story" podcast, which takes a strong stance against these cueing methodologies, but I felt constant frustration that nobody ever seemed to point out that not every text has accompanying pictures! How do the believers in cueing methods expect a kid to read a headline? Or a sign? Or this very comment?

gregwebs 3y ago

Some students still struggle to learn reading in a phonics-based reading environment. Teachers or those with influence over the curriculum get sold on some other program that they are told is going to make things better, and it might for a few students, but as explained here, it’s not evidence-based that it’s going to be better for everyone. A friend of mine lives in a well off school district that adopted a non-phonics approach. Her child was falling behind in reading, so she had to teach her phonics at home and then she caught up. She wasn’t happy that she had to do the school’s job for them.

Akronymus 3y ago
> Some students still struggle to learn reading in a phonics-based reading environment. That is to be expected. But as it turns out, the alternative is holding most people back, instead of helping the ones who struggle.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>She wasn’t happy that she had to do the school’s job for them. Imagine not getting pleasure from helping your child learn to read.
- okeuro49 3y ago
  > Imagine not getting pleasure from helping your child learn to read. Bizarre reply given the full context of the comment.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Is calling out parents who apparently fell for the "we will care for your child, so you can go to work and dont be bothered" meme really so bizarre? I disagree. It is actually high time to do this more!
- civilized 3y ago
  ...where to begin. It's really frustrating when your kid goes to a place all day where their most important job, by far, is to teach the kid to read, and they fail to do it, and you have to pick up the pieces. A parent who has the time, energy, and skill to teach their child to read after work is blessed. Same goes for the kid - sometimes kids come home tired after school and don't want to be subjected to more learning activities! I say this as a parent who has spent a lot of energy teaching both of my kids to read. The younger one has been much harder than the other. And I am just praying that what the school is doing is working, because it's a struggle to get her to spend even more time sitting and focused on page after page of black and white. I've seen some of the school materials and they are phonics-based, so I think it's on the right track, but a lot depends on the teacher. A couple months ago I went to a parent teacher conference for her where the teacher talked as if she could be sure the little one would be fine, because she'd taught her brother who got concepts very quickly. And I had to explain that actually no, the little one isn't the same, she isn't anywhere near where her brother was at that age, and I laid out the specifics. I did manage to get the teacher to make a bit of a surprised face and take some notes about it. People sometimes romanticize the experience of having children too much. In reality it can be a struggle with no assurance that things are going to be okay. And the guilt of leaving your child struggling with an essential life skill feels like sinking to the bottom of the ocean. My little one is currently very young but if she continues to lag, who knows what I will do? I might have to destroy my work schedule to home school her. I love my job and it brings in truckloads of money for the family, but am I going to spend all my time on that and let my kid be failed by the people I pay to help her? Not a chance.

red_admiral 3y ago

There is a genuinely held belief among many educators that if, instead of making children do boring repetetive things like decoding and chanting syllables (or learning times tables), teachers just took a step back and let childrens' magical inner light shine, they would pick up the skills they need as they go along and be much happier on top of that. For more details on this, and the people and companies involved in the phonics situation specifically, I can recommend the free podcast "sold a story" [1] (or its transcript, if you learnt to read back when phonics were in fashion). The tragedy here is that people were genuinely trying to do good, followed an approach that felt compassionate and humane, and there were even a couple of small studies backing them up. And there are a minority of children (more often than not from well-to-do households) who do indeed pick up reading without any formal instruction in phonics; trying to replicate their experience for everyone else too seems like a virtuous project. The problem is that, according to a lot of substantial scientific research, this no-phonics approach simply does not work for a majority of children, and leaves them functionally illiterate - that or your parents, if they notice and afford it, hire a private reading tutor so the effect of no-phonics reading instruction in schools is actually to widen rather than narrow demographic gaps in reading. [1] https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

rayiner 3y ago
> The tragedy here is that people were genuinely trying to do good, followed an approach that felt compassionate and humane I don’t think this assigns sufficient fault to the teachers. Being insufficiently skeptical of newfangled approaches to something fundamental like how to teach kids to read is blameworthy.
- civilized 3y ago
  For decades! And ignoring decades of direct experience of it not working!
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Personally, I would say there's a lot of blame to go around but around 0% of that should fall on the median teacher. In a lot of places, teachers' jobs are in practice to keep up with implementing the endless flood of initiatives and programmes and innovations meant to make things better, often written by people who have no clue. The median teacher will discover quite soon that any criticism of the latest guidelines coming down from above is not welcome. It's a bit like hiring a programmer to build a fairly standard mobile app, but deciding that it has to be done in a blockchain-based microservice framework with some AI thrown in, written in a research language designed for someone's MSc thesis. Tell the programmer not to questions these decisions OR ELSE, then blame them when the project fails, and you have roughly the situation in some states' education sectors. In the UK, a case recently made the headlines where a head teacher ended their own life after Ofsted (the government's office for education) downgraded their school's rating. Schools are in the game of guessing what they think Ofsted will like as much as some students are in the game of guessing what they think their teacher will like to read in their essay to get an A, and it certainly seems like schools demonstrating enthusiasm in implementing the latest Ofsted initiatives is part of the whole circus. The median teacher is on the receiving end of both the government's initiatives and their head teacher's ideas on how to implement them; if they use whole-language instruction because that's what Big Brother has made this week's doctrine then I'd allocate the blame 100% to the people with actual structural power in this situation. (There is a whole book on this, Teach Like Nobody's Watching by Mark Enser, trying to encourage teachers to go outside the box of "what will look good on the next Ofsted inspection" where they are given the leeway to do this by their head teachers.) Although phonics has many studies behind it showing that it works better than whole-language, to the extent that I strongly support teaching phonics, you'll note that part of the original topic title is "NY is Forcing Schools to ...". That's how orders come down to teachers in the real world, so it seems unfair to blame teachers too much for the results.

ermir 3y ago

It’s because of the influence of the Marxist Paolo Freire whose techniques and outlook are the dominant ones in the teaching colleges. He specifically hated phonics since it’s only used for rote and mechanical reading, which is a tool to make the reader useful in capitalism. Instead, he advocated for political and revolutionary techniques to awaken “critical consciousness” or “conscientize” the reader into being a revolutionary.

red_admiral 3y ago
Although just about every "progressive" educator in the UK/US I've heard or read will cite Freire glowingly, I think we're reading far more into him than is actually there. He very much did advocate for critical consciousness and awakening revolutionary potential, but he is (to use Egan's three-aspect model of academic, developmental and social goals of education) much more on the social than the developmental side of things - the two are not the same! Freire is not so much about every student reaching their own innate potential without "spoiling" them through external pressure, but about molding students to a Marxist view of progress through sufficent application of external pressure. One can disagree with both these approaches while still recognizing that the two are very different things. The same problem exists to some extent with Marx himself, whether or not you agree with Marxism (I don't), I'm with Freddie deBoer that Marxism is a MATERIALIST not a SPIRITUAL movement; Marx does not want workers to "feel valued" while laboring for their capitalist overlords, he wants them to own the means of production! Some of the "Marxists" in today's university social justice circles would do well to notice that.