4 ms·

Illiteracy Is a Policy Choice

117 points by themgt 1y ago

alphawhisky 1y ago
I feel it's worth noting that while the outcome of these changes to teaching reading is a huge win for childhood education, this does not mean that Mississippi has a great education system. They are still in the bottom 10 states annually for ACT scores and although they have improved learning outcomes for students the issues of equity within their schools still exist. It's also worth noting that the state is a net consumer of federal tax dollars year after year, using $2.34 in federal aid for every dollar they give in taxes. I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own.
- joenot443 1y ago
  > I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own I don't think the success of a literacy program is negated by the existence of crime on college campuses. I also don't think it's the fault of MS that its citizens generally produce less tax revenue than Californians or New Yorkers. The expression is "credit where credit's due" and I'd say in this case, credit's due. Well done Mississippi.
- dh2022 1y ago
  Re: "I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own." - you have your priorities, other people have their priorities. My priorities for example are reading and math proficiency. Well done Mississippi on your students' reading progress!
- rayiner 1y ago
  Unsurprisingly, educational reform in Mississippi that started in 2013 has yet to percolate up to high schools. As to equity, Mississippi is doing better for black students than almost anyone else: > Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.) As to your other point, Mississippi receives the same amount of federal spending per person as New York: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Balance-of-Payments-Federal-2024.pdf https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Balance-of-P... (page 11). New York of course pays more in taxes—because it has Wall Street and Mississippi doesn’t.
Steven420 1y ago
This is why literacy improved: "The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.1 This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound." The fact that the debunked "whole language" method is being used seems intentionally destructive
- creer 1y ago
  Is current illiteracy really founded in WHICH method of teaching to use? Or is that the kind of nitpicking that school districts, consultants and political campaigns love to battle over, while not doing a whole lot on the ground?
  - Spivak 1y ago
    According to research, yes. Children who are taught to read by "guessing" are demonstrably worse readers, even when evaluated years later. I don't think there's much of a battle going on outside of the effort it takes push the fix out everywhere. Is anyone left defending the thoroughly flawed system? I doubt there's very much pride wrapped up in it. The folks who invented the whole word system meant well. The biggest factor is probably the fact that there isn't a giant corporation whose quarterly profits depends on selling the materials for and teaching the flawed system for their income. Amazing that.
    - creer 1y ago
      By this article's data and other data linked, reading scores have been FALLING since 2015 (2013 for other scores) - and through 2024. This cannot be because of NOT adopting some reform. Something else has to be in play. You cannot damage some production result merely by NOT introducing some change. That's insane. "According to research" has some explaining to do. I'm not saying that changing the teaching method would or wouldn't help. I'm saying that something ELSE had to actively happen that caused the measured drop.
  - astura 1y ago
zug_zug 1y ago
I feel like this article is a bit too confident for the evidence provided. I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests. Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!) I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice. Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated. [He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]
AfterHIA 1y ago
Illiteracy is a weapon. Get a critical mass of the populace to have no interest in Shakespeare, Goethe, Socrates, or Cervantes and these people will find other ways to amuse themselves. Eventually they will amuse themselves to death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...
supermatt 1y ago
How does phonics based reading work? Is it anything like the “initial teaching alphabet” which left many unable to read “real” English?
- jsmith45 1y ago
  Phonics based reading is all about sounding out unknown words. The idea is that the student would understand if somebody else read the text out loud, so if we can teach the kids how to convert the written words into sounds, they can understand many new words they first come across. The core idea is to teach the kids that certain letters or groups of letters map to certain sounds (phonemes) at a start, and then gradually introduce more and more rules of English phonetics, allowing students to successfully learn to sound out even more complicated words. The hope is that students will gradually learn to just recognize words by sight, which the overwhelming majority do eventually learn to do, and just need to sound out unfamiliar words. The fact that some students have struggled to learn to recognize words and need to sound most out is part of why people try to create alternatives, but those largely don't work well. Of course, English does have some tricky phonetics. We have some words with multiple different pronunciations. We have some words with the same phonemes but different meanings that differ solely based on syllable stress. There are even some words whose pronunciation simply must be memorized, as there is no coherent rule to get from the word to the pronunciation (see for example Colonel).

117 points by themgt 1y ago

I feel it's worth noting that while the outcome of these changes to teaching reading is a huge win for childhood education, this does not mean that Mississippi has a great education system. They are still in the bottom 10 states annually for ACT scores and although they have improved learning outcomes for students the issues of equity within their schools still exist. It's also worth noting that the state is a net consumer of federal tax dollars year after year, using $2.34 in federal aid for every dollar they give in taxes. I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own.

joenot443 1y ago
> I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own I don't think the success of a literacy program is negated by the existence of crime on college campuses. I also don't think it's the fault of MS that its citizens generally produce less tax revenue than Californians or New Yorkers. The expression is "credit where credit's due" and I'd say in this case, credit's due. Well done Mississippi.
dh2022 1y ago
Re: "I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own." - you have your priorities, other people have their priorities. My priorities for example are reading and math proficiency. Well done Mississippi on your students' reading progress!
rayiner 1y ago
Unsurprisingly, educational reform in Mississippi that started in 2013 has yet to percolate up to high schools. As to equity, Mississippi is doing better for black students than almost anyone else: > Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.) As to your other point, Mississippi receives the same amount of federal spending per person as New York: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Balance-of-Payments-Federal-2024.pdf https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Balance-of-P... (page 11). New York of course pays more in taxes—because it has Wall Street and Mississippi doesn’t.

Steven420 1y ago

This is why literacy improved: "The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.1 This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound." The fact that the debunked "whole language" method is being used seems intentionally destructive

creer 1y ago
Is current illiteracy really founded in WHICH method of teaching to use? Or is that the kind of nitpicking that school districts, consultants and political campaigns love to battle over, while not doing a whole lot on the ground?
- Spivak 1y ago
  According to research, yes. Children who are taught to read by "guessing" are demonstrably worse readers, even when evaluated years later. I don't think there's much of a battle going on outside of the effort it takes push the fix out everywhere. Is anyone left defending the thoroughly flawed system? I doubt there's very much pride wrapped up in it. The folks who invented the whole word system meant well. The biggest factor is probably the fact that there isn't a giant corporation whose quarterly profits depends on selling the materials for and teaching the flawed system for their income. Amazing that.
  - creer 1y ago
    By this article's data and other data linked, reading scores have been FALLING since 2015 (2013 for other scores) - and through 2024. This cannot be because of NOT adopting some reform. Something else has to be in play. You cannot damage some production result merely by NOT introducing some change. That's insane. "According to research" has some explaining to do. I'm not saying that changing the teaching method would or wouldn't help. I'm saying that something ELSE had to actively happen that caused the measured drop.
- astura 1y ago

zug_zug 1y ago

I feel like this article is a bit too confident for the evidence provided. I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests. Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!) I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice. Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated. [He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]

AfterHIA 1y ago

Illiteracy is a weapon. Get a critical mass of the populace to have no interest in Shakespeare, Goethe, Socrates, or Cervantes and these people will find other ways to amuse themselves. Eventually they will amuse themselves to death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...

supermatt 1y ago

How does phonics based reading work? Is it anything like the “initial teaching alphabet” which left many unable to read “real” English?

jsmith45 1y ago
Phonics based reading is all about sounding out unknown words. The idea is that the student would understand if somebody else read the text out loud, so if we can teach the kids how to convert the written words into sounds, they can understand many new words they first come across. The core idea is to teach the kids that certain letters or groups of letters map to certain sounds (phonemes) at a start, and then gradually introduce more and more rules of English phonetics, allowing students to successfully learn to sound out even more complicated words. The hope is that students will gradually learn to just recognize words by sight, which the overwhelming majority do eventually learn to do, and just need to sound out unfamiliar words. The fact that some students have struggled to learn to recognize words and need to sound most out is part of why people try to create alternatives, but those largely don't work well. Of course, English does have some tricky phonetics. We have some words with multiple different pronunciations. We have some words with the same phonemes but different meanings that differ solely based on syllable stress. There are even some words whose pronunciation simply must be memorized, as there is no coherent rule to get from the word to the pronunciation (see for example Colonel).