Just wait until you get to the part in the podcast where the teacher intentionally covers up a word with a post-it note and then asks the kids to read it. Apparently, they are supposed to figure out the word from the context.
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
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Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of the era. I learned to read at home. Both of my kids, likewise. It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? Moreover, learning to read…
> ... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance. That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.
Phonics based approaches to reading have been a mainstay of private and home school programs for decades. It creates a silly disparity between those who can afford or are willing to sacrifice enough to put there children through them and those who have to use the public school system. Every once in a while the parents will have enough and revolt somehow.
I was home-schooled from 2nd grade onward, so I never really experienced the public system. But one of the small towns where I grew up had one of those revolts while I was in college. My mom because she had been homeschooling for a number of years and knew by experience how to teach a phonics based approach ended up helping a group of parents learn how to teach it to their children. A non-trivial number of families just pulled their kids out of the school and home-schooled them. I remember thinking at the time that the school was oddly hostile to updating their curriculum and approach despite concrete evidence that the phonics method substantially improved the students reading ability in part due to the training my mom gave parents and the tutoring she provided for some the students. You could see dramatic before and after results right there.
Show a parent that there is a simple method to improve their child's reading and they will fight tooth and nail to get them access to that method. Unfortunately not every town or school district will have someone who knows and can share the information.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#43Well over a century ago now, my grandmother taught grades 1 through 8 in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Barring a substitute teacher when grandma was sick, she was the only teacher those kids ever saw until they went to the (fairly distant) high school for grade 9. Grandma was a good teacher, and every year the valedictorian at that HS was one of grandma's students. The only "central administration" that she had to care about was the little school district's Superintendent. He had no time, staff, nor budget for messing with things that worked. Nor possible upsides if he got any "new ideas" about education.
Grandma's own education was high school, plus maybe a two-year teaching certificate from a Podunk little Normal School ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/normal-school ). Her three rules for teaching 8 grades in a 1-room school house were: (1) Make sure the 1st graders all learn to read, (2) Make sure the 8th graders learn everything they'll need for high school, and (3) Make sure there's plenty of older-kids-teach-younger-ones going on in between, because you've only got time to hit the high points for grades 2 to 7.
But a whole lot changed over the decades, as American "Teacher Education" grew from a bare-minimum service sector into a huge, self-serving established empire. Especially after WWII, an incredible amount of money flowed into colleges & universities. Old stuff that worked couldn't possibly get you ahead in that empire. "Johnny can read" results take a decade to play out in the real world. Vs. cool-sounding new ideas, especially if you could stick a "Science" label on 'em (the status of "science" was incredibly boosted by WWII) and were skilled at spreading FUD and FOMO, could rocket you to success in the ever-growing academic / administrator / consultant / author / etc. Education Establishment.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"? In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lone…
The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words. They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.
As a parent with kids who struggled (actually, performed average) on these nonsense word tests, I do think that is bullshit. If you somehow manage to cheat and get your kids to recognize all the high frequency words they need to be fluent, congratulations, you have taught them to read.
Let's keep kids' achievement measures out of the cynical distrust of our teaching staff.
Edit: Yes, I am biased. And, TheOtherHobbes made better and clearer points than me in my sister comment.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#45This was aired on my local NPR station a couple of months ago. It's pretty interesting stuff.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#46I 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 understan…
Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences bungle somewhere below even social psychology. There's no reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and ministeries, and mandate methods and topics. We should take t…
Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics, media, and even in game design.
If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#47I 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 understan…
> 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?
You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the rooftops about this for generations.
For example from another story posted here today:
Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.
Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.
There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#48I 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 understan…
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 my education degree program, in the intro class we spent time every week discussing recent research papers we had read. I was interested in practicing, not doing research, but when selecting schools there were clearly some that had a research focus and some that had a practical focus.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#49As 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…
Can vouch - that book is how I learned to read. I became a very strong reader afterward - so much so that when I was 7 the Black and Decker guide to Home Wiring was hours of entertainment.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#50Can anyone suggest better materials / guides for early literacy development?