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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 l

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.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    > 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. I would actually make a more grounded analogy. Let's pretend for a moment there exists some very large, well-studied and scientifically-valid body of research which says object-oriented programming is unequivocally bad. Programmers who follow object-oriented development practices are invariably less productive and create more security vulnerabilities. While these findings have been well-known to computer science researchers for decades, they have been unilaterally ignored by the technology industry, which continues to use languages such as Java and C++. Software engineers with experience in object-oriented development are paid higher salaries. Object-oriented programming continues to be taught at colleges and universities. Eventually, the research about OO hits the mainstream press. Experts calculate OO is responsible for a zillion additional ransomware attacks per year, leading to numerous deaths at hospitals around the world. Would you hold individual programmers responsible for using object-oriented programming? You can replace OO with whatever holy war topic you prefer. Memory safety. Strict typing. React. Electron. POSIX. Serverless. Scrum. In at least one case, it's probably true.
okeuro49 3y ago
This is an endemic problem across all of the education system, in the UK as well. There is a school in London that eschews modern teaching (no group work, etc. teacher is the authority). It gets great results but is a pariah as it subscribes to no modern education doctrine: https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/ https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
- kybernetyk 3y ago
  I think education should be treated like medicine: Do the conservative thing that has been proven to work. And if you've got some new brilliant idea on how to improve things run studies and trials before you unleash your "feelgood and humane approach" on defenseless children. Education feels like a test laboratory where every (sorry) idiot can bullshit people into doing insane things solely based on emotions and a handful (of probably useless) studies.
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    The tragedy with phonics in particular is that we have the kind of evidence in favour that comes close to medical standards of "proven to work" - at least a lot better than the alternative - and some states or schools are still going "meh".
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
I just want to second the recommendation for the Sold a Story podcast, which will put all of this into context.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  For anyone wanting even more background and context, I recommend Kieran Egan's "The educated mind" which argues among other things that there are three, not just two, conflicting paradigms behind schooling - not just the academic/developmental conflict of which phonics vs whole-language is an example, but also the third paradigm of socialisation. You might or might not agree with Egan's conclusions, but his background and context is properly researched. However, be warned that he is not exactly the most readable author out there, to put it mildly.

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.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > 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. I would actually make a more grounded analogy. Let's pretend for a moment there exists some very large, well-studied and scientifically-valid body of research which says object-oriented programming is unequivocally bad. Programmers who follow object-oriented development practices are invariably less productive and create more security vulnerabilities. While these findings have been well-known to computer science researchers for decades, they have been unilaterally ignored by the technology industry, which continues to use languages such as Java and C++. Software engineers with experience in object-oriented development are paid higher salaries. Object-oriented programming continues to be taught at colleges and universities. Eventually, the research about OO hits the mainstream press. Experts calculate OO is responsible for a zillion additional ransomware attacks per year, leading to numerous deaths at hospitals around the world. Would you hold individual programmers responsible for using object-oriented programming? You can replace OO with whatever holy war topic you prefer. Memory safety. Strict typing. React. Electron. POSIX. Serverless. Scrum. In at least one case, it's probably true.

okeuro49 3y ago

This is an endemic problem across all of the education system, in the UK as well. There is a school in London that eschews modern teaching (no group work, etc. teacher is the authority). It gets great results but is a pariah as it subscribes to no modern education doctrine: https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/ https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]
kybernetyk 3y ago
I think education should be treated like medicine: Do the conservative thing that has been proven to work. And if you've got some new brilliant idea on how to improve things run studies and trials before you unleash your "feelgood and humane approach" on defenseless children. Education feels like a test laboratory where every (sorry) idiot can bullshit people into doing insane things solely based on emotions and a handful (of probably useless) studies.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  The tragedy with phonics in particular is that we have the kind of evidence in favour that comes close to medical standards of "proven to work" - at least a lot better than the alternative - and some states or schools are still going "meh".

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

I just want to second the recommendation for the Sold a Story podcast, which will put all of this into context.

red_admiral 3y ago
For anyone wanting even more background and context, I recommend Kieran Egan's "The educated mind" which argues among other things that there are three, not just two, conflicting paradigms behind schooling - not just the academic/developmental conflict of which phonics vs whole-language is an example, but also the third paradigm of socialisation. You might or might not agree with Egan's conclusions, but his background and context is properly researched. However, be warned that he is not exactly the most readable author out there, to put it mildly.