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Why was there such a push to replace this with other methods? I’ve only heard far fetched conspiracy theories.

by api 3y ago

zharknado 3y ago
Highly recommend the Sold a Story podcast (mentioned elsewhere) for a synopsis accessible to laypeople. A big part was guilt by association with a behaviorist view of education. Phonics is very rote and mechanical, which clashes with notions of whole, meaningful problem solving. By analogy, think reps on Spanish flash cards vs speaking Spanish to solve a mystery or order lunch. At first blush mechanical drills feel divorced from an authentic lifelike context, which can lead to poor engagement and generalization. Then there’s the affective layer—how you feel about the subject and your ability in it. If all you do is drill Spanish flash cards, you might worry that a lot of kids will hate Spanish instruction. Alternative reading methodologies put a lot of emphasis on kids falling in love with reading. But it turns out that in all the well-intentioned holistic thinking they basically they forgot/missed that decoding phonetic information is just super important as a discrete outcome, and you can’t skip addressing it directly or many kids will fail to infer it on their own. And turns out it’s not so boring for little kids, because it’s new to them, and decoding skills give them much-needed momentum to read literally any text they encounter in their daily lives.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  That's right. Kiddo was grabbing everything around the house and reading all the labels. Everything. Bottles of hot sauce, recycling instructions, air purifier operating manuals, shampoo labels... The world was a marvel because everything could be decoded and understood. Reading is our first superpower. "Don't tell me which one! I'll read and find it!"
tastyfreeze 3y ago
My teacher friends say phonics doesn't work for maybe 25% of kids. I suspect that is caused more by parents not following up with reading at home than a failing of phonics itself.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  From the articles I've read it's largely this. There are a percentage of kids that have other underlying issues that get in the way of learning in general, not just phonics in particular. Dyslexia (which is often exacerbated by "whole word" methods), and ADHD (which is more often a food allergy than a real disorder that needs medication) do account for some. But in most of those cases it's a matter of... higher effort. Parents need to do more to provide the environment if they can, or hunt down and resolve the food allergy, or just push their children. School districts can spend more on qualified teachers. I'd speculate that 25% could be knocked down to 5% if we as a culture sat up and worked at it. But it requires a consensus reality, and broad alignment. Difficult. The best we can do at the moment is to spread the evidence and do right by our own children. (My mother was a K-12 school teacher in the Detroit school system for ~30 years. She's seen all the fads come and go. Phonics is not a fad; it works.)
slowmovintarget 3y ago
This is speculation on my part: It is harder to train teachers to teach phonics, it's harder to teach students, and it requires more effort both on the part of the students and on the part of their parents. But decades of evidence and multitudes of studies on reading comprehension tells us it works better for every student exposed to it. Couple the higher effort with the financial interest in producing new materials aimed at the easy road and you get corporate interests using emotional arguments like the easy methods are "more equitable" (which is untrue). The political argument was used as a sales tactic, and it fell on ears already predisposed to hear it. The result was administrators across the country representing corporate interests under the guise of righteousness. So no conspiracy but the usual profit motive couched in feel-good political language. But that's a guess.
SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
That's probably multifaceted. One reason, and I know it's an unsatisfying answer, is that other methods were sexier. Phonics seems really dry, and "schoolma'amy". "Here's a bunch of rules on how letters make words and a big list of apparent exceptions to memorise." There's also the expert problem, where anybody teaching reading has long forgotten just how hard it is to learn. It seems totally natural to most people in the modern day to be able to read. But it's actually totally unnatural. Hence why you have a bunch of methods designed to get kids to start "naturally" reading, without all that nasty, boring, rule-teaching stuff that old stuffy teachers in boarding schools used to do. Not like us modern, cool, hip teachers who actually like kids, etc. Etc. It's as much about identity as anything else in my opinion. Like many inexplicable things.
analog31 3y ago
A non-conspiratorial hunch is that the actual success rate of teaching reading wasn't considered good enough (perhaps far short of 100% literacy) and educators went looking for something different that might be better. "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetency." I've also heard rumors that countries with pictographic languages have higher literacy rates. Yet I'm still as puzzled as you are. I'm not homeschooled pe se, but learned to read at home, as did my mom. In our culture, it was just how things were done. You learned to read when you were ready. My mom taught my brothers and me from reproductions of some schoolbooks from the 18th century, plus stuff from the public library. Later on, my spouse and I taught our kids in the same way. From my standpoint, "phonics" made sense, as it used a built-in feature of the language, and thus didn't really need any kind of formal method. Also, it lent itself to one-on-one with the kids because we were sitting and reading to them anyway. It was easy to stop, point to a word, and ask them to sound it out. My kids went to a public school with a high population of educated parents, and the majority of kids were reading by the start of kindergarten, for many it was their second language.
hackinthebochs 3y ago
"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 that 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."[1] This quote seems almost absurd on its face, but I've seen other articles that mirror the sentiment. Essentially, teachers didn't like the "robotic" and "dehumanizing" drilling in phonics, and some EdD's provided them with a comforting "progressive" alternative that was stamped with the authority of the academy. [1] https://archive.ph/2022.08.12-141010/https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/#selection-1075.110-1075.176 https://archive.ph/2022.08.12-141010/https://time.com/620508...

Why was there such a push to replace this with other methods? I’ve only heard far fetched conspiracy theories.

by api 3y ago

Why was there such a push to replace this with other methods? I’ve only heard far fetched conspiracy theories.

Highly recommend the Sold a Story podcast (mentioned elsewhere) for a synopsis accessible to laypeople. A big part was guilt by association with a behaviorist view of education. Phonics is very rote and mechanical, which clashes with notions of whole, meaningful problem solving. By analogy, think reps on Spanish flash cards vs speaking Spanish to solve a mystery or order lunch. At first blush mechanical drills feel divorced from an authentic lifelike context, which can lead to poor engagement and generalization. Then there’s the affective layer—how you feel about the subject and your ability in it. If all you do is drill Spanish flash cards, you might worry that a lot of kids will hate Spanish instruction. Alternative reading methodologies put a lot of emphasis on kids falling in love with reading. But it turns out that in all the well-intentioned holistic thinking they basically they forgot/missed that decoding phonetic information is just super important as a discrete outcome, and you can’t skip addressing it directly or many kids will fail to infer it on their own. And turns out it’s not so boring for little kids, because it’s new to them, and decoding skills give them much-needed momentum to read literally any text they encounter in their daily lives.

slowmovintarget 3y ago
That's right. Kiddo was grabbing everything around the house and reading all the labels. Everything. Bottles of hot sauce, recycling instructions, air purifier operating manuals, shampoo labels... The world was a marvel because everything could be decoded and understood. Reading is our first superpower. "Don't tell me which one! I'll read and find it!"

tastyfreeze 3y ago

My teacher friends say phonics doesn't work for maybe 25% of kids. I suspect that is caused more by parents not following up with reading at home than a failing of phonics itself.

slowmovintarget 3y ago
From the articles I've read it's largely this. There are a percentage of kids that have other underlying issues that get in the way of learning in general, not just phonics in particular. Dyslexia (which is often exacerbated by "whole word" methods), and ADHD (which is more often a food allergy than a real disorder that needs medication) do account for some. But in most of those cases it's a matter of... higher effort. Parents need to do more to provide the environment if they can, or hunt down and resolve the food allergy, or just push their children. School districts can spend more on qualified teachers. I'd speculate that 25% could be knocked down to 5% if we as a culture sat up and worked at it. But it requires a consensus reality, and broad alignment. Difficult. The best we can do at the moment is to spread the evidence and do right by our own children. (My mother was a K-12 school teacher in the Detroit school system for ~30 years. She's seen all the fads come and go. Phonics is not a fad; it works.)

slowmovintarget 3y ago

This is speculation on my part: It is harder to train teachers to teach phonics, it's harder to teach students, and it requires more effort both on the part of the students and on the part of their parents. But decades of evidence and multitudes of studies on reading comprehension tells us it works better for every student exposed to it. Couple the higher effort with the financial interest in producing new materials aimed at the easy road and you get corporate interests using emotional arguments like the easy methods are "more equitable" (which is untrue). The political argument was used as a sales tactic, and it fell on ears already predisposed to hear it. The result was administrators across the country representing corporate interests under the guise of righteousness. So no conspiracy but the usual profit motive couched in feel-good political language. But that's a guess.

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago

That's probably multifaceted. One reason, and I know it's an unsatisfying answer, is that other methods were sexier. Phonics seems really dry, and "schoolma'amy". "Here's a bunch of rules on how letters make words and a big list of apparent exceptions to memorise." There's also the expert problem, where anybody teaching reading has long forgotten just how hard it is to learn. It seems totally natural to most people in the modern day to be able to read. But it's actually totally unnatural. Hence why you have a bunch of methods designed to get kids to start "naturally" reading, without all that nasty, boring, rule-teaching stuff that old stuffy teachers in boarding schools used to do. Not like us modern, cool, hip teachers who actually like kids, etc. Etc. It's as much about identity as anything else in my opinion. Like many inexplicable things.

analog31 3y ago

A non-conspiratorial hunch is that the actual success rate of teaching reading wasn't considered good enough (perhaps far short of 100% literacy) and educators went looking for something different that might be better. "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetency." I've also heard rumors that countries with pictographic languages have higher literacy rates. Yet I'm still as puzzled as you are. I'm not homeschooled pe se, but learned to read at home, as did my mom. In our culture, it was just how things were done. You learned to read when you were ready. My mom taught my brothers and me from reproductions of some schoolbooks from the 18th century, plus stuff from the public library. Later on, my spouse and I taught our kids in the same way. From my standpoint, "phonics" made sense, as it used a built-in feature of the language, and thus didn't really need any kind of formal method. Also, it lent itself to one-on-one with the kids because we were sitting and reading to them anyway. It was easy to stop, point to a word, and ask them to sound it out. My kids went to a public school with a high population of educated parents, and the majority of kids were reading by the start of kindergarten, for many it was their second language.

hackinthebochs 3y ago

"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 that 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."[1] This quote seems almost absurd on its face, but I've seen other articles that mirror the sentiment. Essentially, teachers didn't like the "robotic" and "dehumanizing" drilling in phonics, and some EdD's provided them with a comforting "progressive" alternative that was stamped with the authority of the academy. [1] https://archive.ph/2022.08.12-141010/https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/#selection-1075.110-1075.176 https://archive.ph/2022.08.12-141010/https://time.com/620508...