Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be shipped. They may have even "observed developers" or "measured output" in constructing these things, and thought they had figured out The Way and knew how to systematize it, and deserved to sell it for millions of dollars, along with training, books, etc.

EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods.

I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?

If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?

I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?

Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.

Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.

Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...

From friends that have suffered through education degrees, it doesn’t sound like the field sees itself as a part of the scientific community at all.

There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators.

The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than scientifically proven effectiveness research.

It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we had made a mistake.