I have mixed feelings on this. Like many of the comments below, I did drills for multiplication tables through 10x10, and I did enjoy the sense of accomplishment, though even after all these years, I feel vaguely resentful of the number 56 (7x8 was the hardest product for me to remember).
I also remember hating phonics, even though I’m an avid reader today. I still feel stressed remembering the Mouse in the House book my mom drilled me on. I came to rely a lot on straight memorization, rather than learning sounds. I could recite my Dr. Suess books by heart.
And for me, on geography and history, drills straight up did not work. They convinced me that I was bad at those subjects and I avoided them well into adulthood, where I discovered I did enjoy them, but it’s really important for me to see the connections in between each other. Still not great at dates, but can interpolate based on what was going on everywhere else at the time.
Re teaching history, it should be inquiry-based. That means starting out with a question, like, say, "Is America exceptional?". The teacher then guides the students with resources for them to read and answer the question for themselves. What the teacher thinks shouldn't have anything to do with it.
One last point, many liberal pundits made the point that Republicans politicized race to win in Virginia. Republicans politicized race? Am I not to believe my lying eyes? Black Lives Matter is rooted in the politics of Democrats. DEIA and it’s mandatory trainings is all Democrats. My local government peddling Kendi and Deangelo on their website (fostering institutional).
The Republicans are using race in politics narrative is rich. This just in….Kardashians are upset competitors are using sex to sell products.
Has anyone else noticed that liberals seem to hear racists dog whistling better than anyone? They will bend themselves into pretzels to hear a racists dog whistle. A liberal listening to a non-liberal talk about race is like someone getting a hearing tests. They know the beep is coming…but when…what ear…oh no…I’ve got to click button…it must have beeped! Dog whistle…dog whistle…!
The dog whistle charge is so powerful in woke liberal circles they will level it even if someone just says straight up racists shit! No that wasn’t a dog whistle…that was just simple spoken racism.
Thanks for your timely and well-informed commentary. I think I heard that you have kid(s); in any case, your commentary reads as though from the perspective of one with children.
My wife is a high-level math teacher at a local school district in the NW and her students are woefully behind. Not sure that local voters would have supported in-person learning but the results are kind of stark...and she has the smart kids.
However, on the subject of standardized testing, here is the main sticking point for teachers (and their unions), based on what I know:
The test results, as delivered, lack any sort of quality causal analysis, and school boards and administrators - who are typically not trained managers (oddly) but rather teachers-gone-administrators - often do not request said analysis before making decisions on bonus pay, etc., and use results as a political cudgel, especially in places not friendly to unions (my wife saw this in the SE). It ends up being a "garbage in, garbage out" sort of thing, and the actions taken as a result of the test stats ends up not often resulting in the needed changes. Teachers and their unions are *well* aware of some laggards in their departments but school *management* just isn't a discipline given much weight in the field, so facility administrators - who are not trained to do this type of analysis - don't properly use the data and it distorts the impact. If there is a solid way to tease out "nature" from "nurture" here, I'm sure it'd be well-received. Honestly.
In short, I'm pretty sure if teacher unions could see some solid, causal analysis that shows that a cohort of poor kids tested poorly due to *instruction* and not due to *hunger*, for example, standardized tests and their resultant actions that impact faculty would be embraced by most. However, if not, teachers get penalized for teaching the poor kids if, say, there's a recession and mom loses her job.
My understanding is that it also may dissuade teachers from teaching certain types of students, even though they also need instruction. If you know your students get bad test scores, and because of challenges at home, will continue to underperform, you don’t want to get tarred as a low-performing teacher.
I'm wondering about the Virginia narrative about CRT and whether that has been a placeholder for parents pissed off about schools closed during the pandemic.
A school being closed to in-person learning is an *incredible* hardship on parents as well as children. While us ivory tower types (who, for instance, don't have young children at home) can talk about COVID dangers in the abstract, parents who are hit with the everyday reality of their child missing out on critical learning and them missing out on work and forced into increased daily childcare have very real issues that should be easy to exploit by demagogues.
In other words, millions of parents *want* Republican lies about COVID to be true because it would be, well, great if that were the case.
So maybe the Virginia story--and the multiple stories about the stories--are overcomplicating this situation vastly.
(I felt the same way about Democrats losing Hispanic votes in FL/TX in the 2020 election and now VA: this demographic is one that is hard-hit by school closures. And note that Republicans don't act like old-school Republicans used to act in terms of their pension for fiscal austerity. Combine these two and you have a compelling argument to that demo).
I volunteered remotely for Virginia, and I 100% agree with you. The reason the “parents shouldn’t dictate what’s taught” resonated so deeply was that parents felt like they’d lost every bit of control, even to the point of whether their kids could attend school, period. CRT just became a proxy issue.
I remember that McWhorter episode. In fact, he listed three ideas for advancing racial equity. The third was making long-acting reversible birth control cheap and widely available for teenagers. (Not relevant to this piece, of course.)
Phonics is the way, definitely. But just in case there are parents of young children here, phonics presupposes "phonemic awareness," which is the ability to distinguish the word sounds in your language. Dyslexic kids, or at least some dyslexic kids, do not have that. You want to teach the kid that the T at the end of the word means the /t/ sound and the D means the /d/ sound, but you won't be able to do that if your kid can't hear the difference between /t/ and /d/. If your preschool kid is bad at rhyming, get them extra help now. I wish I had known this. (For dyslexics, it's not a hearing problem; the problem is elsewhere in the brain. You should also make sure your child's hearing is good, of course.)
"The sensible policy approach is to close the worst-performing charter schools while allowing the best-performing networks to expand."
This is the essential point. School choice and competition allows for experimentation. Then you can replicate what works well, and stop doing what doesn't work well.
Now you just need to apply the same logic to the public schools. They need school choice and competition to fix them. And the ones that can't be fixed should be shut down.
How many more millions of poor kids should be stuck in schools that don't work?
Yep. That last paragraph says it all really. I watched a disastrous experiment in education called the Whole Language Approach play out in Ontario. It was very popular with the teachers I must say. You don't have to teach spelling or grammar you see. This will be acquired naturally as students progress through their grades. Man, did that ever not happen.
The truth is the pipeline ends somewhere. For things like STEM degrees it ends at a very solid wall. If you wish to undertake such a course of study it does not matter what social or cultural impediments stood in your way of acquiring the math and reading skills you must have to do this. And we very much need every mind we can get prepped and engaged and ready to go. Global warming will not be solved by social justice warriors of any stripe. It will be solved by scientists and engineers. Frankly I don't give a damn what other college faculties do.
I became a voracious reader as a kid precisely because I wanted to read about places and people different from those around me.
I would have been bored out of my mind and not want to read if al that was available was stories about mundane everyday stuff relating to my already familiar surroundings.
That is what learning is about.
But am I unique in this?
I loved fairy tales and stories about horses (never had one) and animals that talk, and children detectives and magic wardrobes and ice queens and pirates and treasure, explorers like Marco Polo, etc.
Kids today love sci fi and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and vampires, etc.
All those books today that deal with everyday life in ordinary neighborhoods sound very boring to me.
As a millennial, I’m always shocked to hear that there’s any controversy at all around phonics. It’s how I learned to read in the late 80s and I just assumed it was how everyone learned to read. Hooked on Phonics, right? Id be curious to hear if there is any correlation between a school/district’s approach to teaching reading and their long term student outcomes… maybe it’s in one of Matt’s links.
Second the pipeline problem. It’s certainly an issue in STEM, one that (white male) colleagues are quick to bring up when racial/gender disparities in the workforce are brought up as a problem for us to own. We certainly invest a lot of employee effort into outreach- STEM programs at schools and with clubs to help get more kids interested in STEM. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it” is a common refrain to encourage women and minorities in STEM to participate in the outreach. But it’s fair to also say, “if you can’t read, you can’t be it.”
I’m already doing it with my almost 3 year old and he loves it. It can be fun to learn how to decode the world around you. I don’t get the argument that it’s too boring???
Living in a red state we do a lot wrong, but we are doing the phonics thing right. My wife is a second grade ELA teacher. She is in a training today and the instructor literally just panned balanced literacy describing it as:
I don't understand the diss? I'm probably just lacking the relevant context, as I have no idea what balanced literacy is. But I can't be the only one. Why is it like that equation?
I have mixed feelings on this. Like many of the comments below, I did drills for multiplication tables through 10x10, and I did enjoy the sense of accomplishment, though even after all these years, I feel vaguely resentful of the number 56 (7x8 was the hardest product for me to remember).
I also remember hating phonics, even though I’m an avid reader today. I still feel stressed remembering the Mouse in the House book my mom drilled me on. I came to rely a lot on straight memorization, rather than learning sounds. I could recite my Dr. Suess books by heart.
And for me, on geography and history, drills straight up did not work. They convinced me that I was bad at those subjects and I avoided them well into adulthood, where I discovered I did enjoy them, but it’s really important for me to see the connections in between each other. Still not great at dates, but can interpolate based on what was going on everywhere else at the time.
Re teaching history, it should be inquiry-based. That means starting out with a question, like, say, "Is America exceptional?". The teacher then guides the students with resources for them to read and answer the question for themselves. What the teacher thinks shouldn't have anything to do with it.
"Settler colonialism."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-10/ethnic-studies-graduation-requirement
One last point, many liberal pundits made the point that Republicans politicized race to win in Virginia. Republicans politicized race? Am I not to believe my lying eyes? Black Lives Matter is rooted in the politics of Democrats. DEIA and it’s mandatory trainings is all Democrats. My local government peddling Kendi and Deangelo on their website (fostering institutional).
The Republicans are using race in politics narrative is rich. This just in….Kardashians are upset competitors are using sex to sell products.
Has anyone else noticed that liberals seem to hear racists dog whistling better than anyone? They will bend themselves into pretzels to hear a racists dog whistle. A liberal listening to a non-liberal talk about race is like someone getting a hearing tests. They know the beep is coming…but when…what ear…oh no…I’ve got to click button…it must have beeped! Dog whistle…dog whistle…!
The dog whistle charge is so powerful in woke liberal circles they will level it even if someone just says straight up racists shit! No that wasn’t a dog whistle…that was just simple spoken racism.
Thank you for this in particular: "Serious people should read serious books and grapple with serious ideas."
Thanks for your timely and well-informed commentary. I think I heard that you have kid(s); in any case, your commentary reads as though from the perspective of one with children.
My wife is a high-level math teacher at a local school district in the NW and her students are woefully behind. Not sure that local voters would have supported in-person learning but the results are kind of stark...and she has the smart kids.
However, on the subject of standardized testing, here is the main sticking point for teachers (and their unions), based on what I know:
The test results, as delivered, lack any sort of quality causal analysis, and school boards and administrators - who are typically not trained managers (oddly) but rather teachers-gone-administrators - often do not request said analysis before making decisions on bonus pay, etc., and use results as a political cudgel, especially in places not friendly to unions (my wife saw this in the SE). It ends up being a "garbage in, garbage out" sort of thing, and the actions taken as a result of the test stats ends up not often resulting in the needed changes. Teachers and their unions are *well* aware of some laggards in their departments but school *management* just isn't a discipline given much weight in the field, so facility administrators - who are not trained to do this type of analysis - don't properly use the data and it distorts the impact. If there is a solid way to tease out "nature" from "nurture" here, I'm sure it'd be well-received. Honestly.
In short, I'm pretty sure if teacher unions could see some solid, causal analysis that shows that a cohort of poor kids tested poorly due to *instruction* and not due to *hunger*, for example, standardized tests and their resultant actions that impact faculty would be embraced by most. However, if not, teachers get penalized for teaching the poor kids if, say, there's a recession and mom loses her job.
My understanding is that it also may dissuade teachers from teaching certain types of students, even though they also need instruction. If you know your students get bad test scores, and because of challenges at home, will continue to underperform, you don’t want to get tarred as a low-performing teacher.
Basically.
I'm wondering about the Virginia narrative about CRT and whether that has been a placeholder for parents pissed off about schools closed during the pandemic.
A school being closed to in-person learning is an *incredible* hardship on parents as well as children. While us ivory tower types (who, for instance, don't have young children at home) can talk about COVID dangers in the abstract, parents who are hit with the everyday reality of their child missing out on critical learning and them missing out on work and forced into increased daily childcare have very real issues that should be easy to exploit by demagogues.
In other words, millions of parents *want* Republican lies about COVID to be true because it would be, well, great if that were the case.
So maybe the Virginia story--and the multiple stories about the stories--are overcomplicating this situation vastly.
(I felt the same way about Democrats losing Hispanic votes in FL/TX in the 2020 election and now VA: this demographic is one that is hard-hit by school closures. And note that Republicans don't act like old-school Republicans used to act in terms of their pension for fiscal austerity. Combine these two and you have a compelling argument to that demo).
I volunteered remotely for Virginia, and I 100% agree with you. The reason the “parents shouldn’t dictate what’s taught” resonated so deeply was that parents felt like they’d lost every bit of control, even to the point of whether their kids could attend school, period. CRT just became a proxy issue.
I remember that McWhorter episode. In fact, he listed three ideas for advancing racial equity. The third was making long-acting reversible birth control cheap and widely available for teenagers. (Not relevant to this piece, of course.)
I've heard him (McWhorter) on other podcasts as well, and he almost always lists those three things.
Phonics is the way, definitely. But just in case there are parents of young children here, phonics presupposes "phonemic awareness," which is the ability to distinguish the word sounds in your language. Dyslexic kids, or at least some dyslexic kids, do not have that. You want to teach the kid that the T at the end of the word means the /t/ sound and the D means the /d/ sound, but you won't be able to do that if your kid can't hear the difference between /t/ and /d/. If your preschool kid is bad at rhyming, get them extra help now. I wish I had known this. (For dyslexics, it's not a hearing problem; the problem is elsewhere in the brain. You should also make sure your child's hearing is good, of course.)
"The sensible policy approach is to close the worst-performing charter schools while allowing the best-performing networks to expand."
This is the essential point. School choice and competition allows for experimentation. Then you can replicate what works well, and stop doing what doesn't work well.
Now you just need to apply the same logic to the public schools. They need school choice and competition to fix them. And the ones that can't be fixed should be shut down.
How many more millions of poor kids should be stuck in schools that don't work?
Yep. That last paragraph says it all really. I watched a disastrous experiment in education called the Whole Language Approach play out in Ontario. It was very popular with the teachers I must say. You don't have to teach spelling or grammar you see. This will be acquired naturally as students progress through their grades. Man, did that ever not happen.
The truth is the pipeline ends somewhere. For things like STEM degrees it ends at a very solid wall. If you wish to undertake such a course of study it does not matter what social or cultural impediments stood in your way of acquiring the math and reading skills you must have to do this. And we very much need every mind we can get prepped and engaged and ready to go. Global warming will not be solved by social justice warriors of any stripe. It will be solved by scientists and engineers. Frankly I don't give a damn what other college faculties do.
"Frankly I don't give a damn what other college faculties do."
Used to kind of agree until those other departments graduated and took over the newsroom and HR department.
Re.: reading.
I became a voracious reader as a kid precisely because I wanted to read about places and people different from those around me.
I would have been bored out of my mind and not want to read if al that was available was stories about mundane everyday stuff relating to my already familiar surroundings.
That is what learning is about.
But am I unique in this?
I loved fairy tales and stories about horses (never had one) and animals that talk, and children detectives and magic wardrobes and ice queens and pirates and treasure, explorers like Marco Polo, etc.
Kids today love sci fi and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and vampires, etc.
All those books today that deal with everyday life in ordinary neighborhoods sound very boring to me.
As a millennial, I’m always shocked to hear that there’s any controversy at all around phonics. It’s how I learned to read in the late 80s and I just assumed it was how everyone learned to read. Hooked on Phonics, right? Id be curious to hear if there is any correlation between a school/district’s approach to teaching reading and their long term student outcomes… maybe it’s in one of Matt’s links.
Second the pipeline problem. It’s certainly an issue in STEM, one that (white male) colleagues are quick to bring up when racial/gender disparities in the workforce are brought up as a problem for us to own. We certainly invest a lot of employee effort into outreach- STEM programs at schools and with clubs to help get more kids interested in STEM. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it” is a common refrain to encourage women and minorities in STEM to participate in the outreach. But it’s fair to also say, “if you can’t read, you can’t be it.”
Similar, I just assumed this *is* how reading is taught.
Does everyone remember the phonics books with the plaid covers? I asked my wife and they were ubiquitous for us across all of our elementary schools.
+1 for phonics education. I'm always at a loss as to how anyone can learn to read without primarily doing it via phonics.
I’m already doing it with my almost 3 year old and he loves it. It can be fun to learn how to decode the world around you. I don’t get the argument that it’s too boring???
Living in a red state we do a lot wrong, but we are doing the phonics thing right. My wife is a second grade ELA teacher. She is in a training today and the instructor literally just panned balanced literacy describing it as:
Balanced literacy approach:
.5 x .5 = .25
I don't understand the diss? I'm probably just lacking the relevant context, as I have no idea what balanced literacy is. But I can't be the only one. Why is it like that equation?
Matt shared this link: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/balanced-literacy-phonics-teaching-reading-evidence Basically, it’s trying to split the difference between advocates for phonics and advocates for rote memorization of words. Paul’s wife’s instructor was saying a half and half approach here only leaves you with a quarter.
My interpretation:
People who support balanced literacy think of it as "0.5 + 0.5 = 1" Add them up, you get a full education!
People who oppose it say it's "0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25" Multiply them and it's worse than just doing one of them!
( You can't take that analogy too far or you'll conclude that it's still better than "0 * 1.0 = 0" )
Ah, got it, thanks.
I think the claim is that if you half of one and half of the other you end up with less value than if you just taught one exclusively.
*if you TEACH half of one