CT's law required schools to use the state curriculum, or submit a waiver to the state and have their curriculum approved as being phonics based. The state had evaluators look at the waivers without knowing which districts submitted them, and a lot of the waivers that were rejected were from the wealthiest schools with some of the best test scores.
It isn't entirely clear why this happened. My guess is that the richer schools were lazier in trying to ensure their curriculum would comply because they assumed that theirs would. It is also possible that those districts are doing a bad job at teaching their students how to read, but the richer parents have the resources to step in to ensure that their kids can read. So the school still has good reading test results despite not actually teaching the kids effectively. Or maybe the districts were right and the state did a bad job with the evaluations.
Matt Yglesias challenge write "the case for Mitch McConnell" - Matt clearly believes that in the value-over-replacement standard McConnell has been good for the republic and I could be persuaded he's right. The Senate Republicans are clearly saner than the House Republicans and they are also saner than the Republican candidates, or at least saner than the candidates pretend to be.
A huge part of this is down to how the Senate works as an institution. I'd prefer for Republicans to be a minority in the Senate but that means Democrats winning elections against them. Given that there are Senate Republicans, better to have them lead by a conservative who tires to achieve negotiable goals instead of throwing nonsense tantrums, and by somebody who without being a Profile in Courage at least *would* get rid of Trump if he *could.*
I don't know what it was, but something just clicked for me in the middle of 1st grade. Up to that point, I was straight "M"s (we were given H, M, and L). After that point everything was obvious once the teacher presented it to us. Silent reading, oh, yeah, arithmetic, fractions, decimals, of course.
By the end of 1st grade I was going up and pulling down the 2nd grade readers from the shelf.
It's interesting that no one here is reading phonetically. Whole language is the goal. The problem is that some never progress past reading phonetically.
So, as a parent of kids with diagnosed learning disabilities, part of the problem is that we view things like this as discrete issues. I despise the way ELA was taught at our elementary school until last year. It was a fail on all levels. The focus on phonics helps ONE aspect of the problem. Lucy Calkins' curriculum stinks, and the reason it stinks isn't just because of the lack of phonics. Do not even get me started on how disastrous her writing workshop is for non-neurotypical students, especially students with dysgraphia. And for all the pushback from principals, when you interview teachers they tend to say things like "Lucy Calkins is great, once you've made all these changes to her program." Her curriculum is based on a fantasy of independent readers and writers, and not a reality of students who need intensive scaffolding to become independent. But what we do is we zero in on one thing that's failing, try to fix it, make it the big new focus, and not think about the curriculum as a whole.
The other problem with what's taught at many schools isn't just phonics. It's that it's what's termed a skill based curriculum that attempts to teach skills abstracted from text. In theory if you have mastered the skills you can apply them to any text. The problem is it doesn't work. It emphasizes things taught on state tests where short passages are used. Kids learn the basic comprehension skills for a passage but do not work up to the higher level skills to read a novel. They're supposed to just do that for fun or something except they don't. If a kid isn't a natural novel reader, school doesn't give them the tools they need to become one. They do not learn how to systematically build up a store of knowledge to aid them in understanding a story. It's like giving kids a book set in India but they don't even know where india is on a map and the curriculum doesn't teach them that. (And since social studies is de emphasized in elementary schools, and when it IS taught they never get outside the USA in most traditional curricula, they won't learn it there either. Schools are so geared to passing the tests, and teachers are systematically taught that until 3rd grade social studies and science are developmentally inappropriate, that no one thinks about how social studies and science, especially social studies, are actually another way of teaching reading skills.) last year, we switched to CKLA, which though not perfect has a lot better understanding of te importance of content rich curriculum. It also scaffolds the kids a lot better for writing.
Getting kids to decode successfully requires phonics. Phonics is what means they CAN read. Making it so they DO read is the next step. Right now we have a situation where many kids aren't readers because they can't. But once they can, we don't provide the intensive, guided exposure to text that they need to become fluent and successful.
Reading involves two parts. Decoding (which is where explicit phonics instruction is necessary) and reading comprehension. You MUST learn to decode first because you can’t comprehend something if you can’t actually read the words.
But just like with reading instruction many (most?) of the schools are doing it wrong. I highly recommend the excellent book “The Knowledge Gap” by Natalie Wexler. In it she shows that building reading comprehension also requires building knowledge. And the best way to do that is with a comprehensive curriculum (social studies/history/civics etc) that covers k-12 (not a bunch of piecemeal stuff). And that it needs to be started early. IE schools actually need to teach content, not just abstract reading comprehension strategies.
Next point, Roland Fryer has demonstrated how to fix public schools, he did it with 20 of the lowest rated schools in Houston. He eliminated the racial achievement gaps within a couple of years. He
Changed personnel
Did frequent testing (every 3 weeks) if most of the class didn’t get the concept they would redo it. If just some didn’t get the concept put them in small tutoring groups till they got it.
“our evidence on “how do you deal with recalcitrant principals?” is basically non-existent.
No it’s not. If you can’t convince them to get on board then fire them. Roland Fryer fired 19 of his 20 principles. You MUST have management alignment.
> in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons.
??? Ever since I learned about this issue I've been 200% on the pro-phonics side, and I kinda assumed I was as rabidly pro-phonics as anyone, but apparently not — this seems crazy!
"English-language spelling reform" is never going to happen, mostly because the language drift is so big and as a culture, we seem to have a tolerance for legitimizing errors, because the usage of the errors have grown so wide spread. It's only a matter of time before "would of" becomes an acceptable grammatical alternative to "would've".
It's because of the contraction "would've", very few people say "would have". Regarding "of", I think there are a lot of dialects on both sides of the pond that slur the F, for instance in sentences like "She's kind of a genius" or "He's sort of a bore". So for non-english or ESL speakers it is not a stretch for them to hear "would of" instead of "would've"
I also see people type "kind've" some times, the reverse phenomenon...
With all due respect to John McWhorter, being a “trained linguist” doesn't necessarily qualify one to have expertise on the best methods for elementary reading instruction. (I happen to think he's right though.)
Slow Boring just warmed my heart by Matt saying he is spelling challenged - boy can I relate to that problem. My grade school days (1-6) were a long time ago, but I remenmber being given a list of words to memorize and then to take a test every Friday. I usally got an 'A'on Friday's test and by Saturday I forgotten how to spell the words. Nothing has changed except Spell Check has saved many of my posts.
I have always been a good reader and I can't remember exactly what was taught to me in schoool, but I can remember my mother and father working with me on my school work. I feel that involved parents are one the most importandt and overlooked qualities of a child's education. Involved parents can overcome many of the failures of public schooling - over crowding, disruptive students, and the over relience on standardized tests - it is as if one size fits all. IT DOESN'T. There should be, or must be be, an allowance for those learn slowly and those who are quicker. We shouldn't hold back the faster learners and at the same time, we shouldn't overlook those who are slower. Sometimes slower wins the race and faster go of the track.
I can not imagine how teachers can put with the actions of today's students as well as today's parents. I think if I were a teacher I wouldn't last the day, as I would be arrested for destruction of private property (cell phones) and sending children to detention (do they still have that?) for being disruptive in class.
Just the other day, I was stopped behind a school bus letting kids (around 10-12 years old) off the bus. I wached this one young lady get off the wearing her back pack (wish I had one in my day), she was wearing an ear piece and walking up the middle of street staring at her phone. Yes, it was in the subiurbs, but we do have sidewalks. As bad as that was, I have seen adults doing the same thing. Rarely do you see anyone walking, let alone walking without looking at their phone.
Two words: "wide Latina" (I will never stop teasing Matt about that one, particularly as he didn't correct it even after about two billion people pointed it out).
The "three-cueing" method just seems crazy on its face. English spelling has rules (though lots of exceptions exist!), but "three-cueing" assumes that it doesn't, and teaches English as if it's spelled with a series of unique pictograms. Since that is not true, and fluency requires knowledges of thousands of words, this would never work! There is no known language that is spelled with unique pictograms because that would be impossible to keep straight.
The whole thing feels quite similar to other scientific frauds in the past.
Great article, making many critical points! The one thing I don’t understand is “Because there are so many schools, it’s inherently difficult to tell if the best schools are just random outliers. “ I think it’s just basic statistics that larger sample makes it easier to detect signal over random noise. Would it really be easier to tell if something worked if there were fewer schools? I can’t see how. Am I missing something here?
You're more likely to find a 7-foot person in a large population than a small one; same concept for schools and their performance. With a large population, you have a better idea what the average is, but also more examples that are far from the average, if only by luck.
No coverage of this subject seems to mention that reading is NOT like other academic subjects. Reading is a habit. You can teach all the phonics you like, but kids who don't have a habit of reading are going to fall way, way behind compared to kids who read habitually. Being a habitual reader is a lifestyle characteristic - children will be influenced far more by their parents' example than by their schooling.
In this regard, reading is more like physical education. Putting kids through half an hour of gym class three times a week might teach them the basics of how to play sports and be active, but kids who are habitually active are going to end up way fitter than kids who are habitually sedentary. This habit too is going to be almost entirely transmitted by parents.
But if we want schools to inculcate habits of reading to the extent that they can, it's very important not only that students learn *to* read, but also that they learn to *like* to read. Just as different kids are interested in different sports, different kids are interested in different types of reading. Some kids might want to read nothing but Mike Lupica, some kids might want to read nothing but Harry Potter, some kids might want to read nothing but News of the Weird - and all of that is fine! Any kid who wants to read anything on their own should be given time and space to do, because habitual independent reading beats everything else by a mile.
As a concrete policy I would argue for letting reading-competent kids test out of phonics instruction and use that time to independently read anything they like. This would allow reading-competent kids to work on their comprehension independently (and not be bored to tears by phonics lessons they don't need).
Possibly more importantly, it would also give less-skilled kids a massive incentive to work hard on being able to test out of phonics. In other words, "if I can learn this and pass that test, then I can read about dragons instead of Dick & Jane!" That there is a much more powerful incentive for an elementary schooler than any grade or test score.
Counterpoint: do the reading logs in during a fixed time period in class. Now all the kids who read have something to write about, but the ones who skipped it are bored out of their minds.
English spelling is very close to the pronunciation… of Henry VIII’s time. When night was pronounced ‘n-igght’, not ‘n-ite’. Very much the way it’s said in Lallans/ lowland Scots. Alas, spelling became regularized during the Great Vowel Shift.
I'm so glad you wrote this to give some nuance and context to the recent push for more phonics!
There's good evidence that children benefit from phonics instruction being embedded within texts that are engaging and meaningful, but doing that successfully with a large classroom is a lot harder than just doing phonics drills and requires a very skilled teacher.
Connecticut passed a good version of one of these laws, but it has received a lot of backlash. https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/31/ct-right-to-read-law-superintendents/
CT's law required schools to use the state curriculum, or submit a waiver to the state and have their curriculum approved as being phonics based. The state had evaluators look at the waivers without knowing which districts submitted them, and a lot of the waivers that were rejected were from the wealthiest schools with some of the best test scores.
It isn't entirely clear why this happened. My guess is that the richer schools were lazier in trying to ensure their curriculum would comply because they assumed that theirs would. It is also possible that those districts are doing a bad job at teaching their students how to read, but the richer parents have the resources to step in to ensure that their kids can read. So the school still has good reading test results despite not actually teaching the kids effectively. Or maybe the districts were right and the state did a bad job with the evaluations.
Matt Yglesias challenge write "the case for Mitch McConnell" - Matt clearly believes that in the value-over-replacement standard McConnell has been good for the republic and I could be persuaded he's right. The Senate Republicans are clearly saner than the House Republicans and they are also saner than the Republican candidates, or at least saner than the candidates pretend to be.
A huge part of this is down to how the Senate works as an institution. I'd prefer for Republicans to be a minority in the Senate but that means Democrats winning elections against them. Given that there are Senate Republicans, better to have them lead by a conservative who tires to achieve negotiable goals instead of throwing nonsense tantrums, and by somebody who without being a Profile in Courage at least *would* get rid of Trump if he *could.*
I don't know what it was, but something just clicked for me in the middle of 1st grade. Up to that point, I was straight "M"s (we were given H, M, and L). After that point everything was obvious once the teacher presented it to us. Silent reading, oh, yeah, arithmetic, fractions, decimals, of course.
By the end of 1st grade I was going up and pulling down the 2nd grade readers from the shelf.
It's interesting that no one here is reading phonetically. Whole language is the goal. The problem is that some never progress past reading phonetically.
So, as a parent of kids with diagnosed learning disabilities, part of the problem is that we view things like this as discrete issues. I despise the way ELA was taught at our elementary school until last year. It was a fail on all levels. The focus on phonics helps ONE aspect of the problem. Lucy Calkins' curriculum stinks, and the reason it stinks isn't just because of the lack of phonics. Do not even get me started on how disastrous her writing workshop is for non-neurotypical students, especially students with dysgraphia. And for all the pushback from principals, when you interview teachers they tend to say things like "Lucy Calkins is great, once you've made all these changes to her program." Her curriculum is based on a fantasy of independent readers and writers, and not a reality of students who need intensive scaffolding to become independent. But what we do is we zero in on one thing that's failing, try to fix it, make it the big new focus, and not think about the curriculum as a whole.
The other problem with what's taught at many schools isn't just phonics. It's that it's what's termed a skill based curriculum that attempts to teach skills abstracted from text. In theory if you have mastered the skills you can apply them to any text. The problem is it doesn't work. It emphasizes things taught on state tests where short passages are used. Kids learn the basic comprehension skills for a passage but do not work up to the higher level skills to read a novel. They're supposed to just do that for fun or something except they don't. If a kid isn't a natural novel reader, school doesn't give them the tools they need to become one. They do not learn how to systematically build up a store of knowledge to aid them in understanding a story. It's like giving kids a book set in India but they don't even know where india is on a map and the curriculum doesn't teach them that. (And since social studies is de emphasized in elementary schools, and when it IS taught they never get outside the USA in most traditional curricula, they won't learn it there either. Schools are so geared to passing the tests, and teachers are systematically taught that until 3rd grade social studies and science are developmentally inappropriate, that no one thinks about how social studies and science, especially social studies, are actually another way of teaching reading skills.) last year, we switched to CKLA, which though not perfect has a lot better understanding of te importance of content rich curriculum. It also scaffolds the kids a lot better for writing.
Getting kids to decode successfully requires phonics. Phonics is what means they CAN read. Making it so they DO read is the next step. Right now we have a situation where many kids aren't readers because they can't. But once they can, we don't provide the intensive, guided exposure to text that they need to become fluent and successful.
Reading involves two parts. Decoding (which is where explicit phonics instruction is necessary) and reading comprehension. You MUST learn to decode first because you can’t comprehend something if you can’t actually read the words.
But just like with reading instruction many (most?) of the schools are doing it wrong. I highly recommend the excellent book “The Knowledge Gap” by Natalie Wexler. In it she shows that building reading comprehension also requires building knowledge. And the best way to do that is with a comprehensive curriculum (social studies/history/civics etc) that covers k-12 (not a bunch of piecemeal stuff). And that it needs to be started early. IE schools actually need to teach content, not just abstract reading comprehension strategies.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Knowledge-Gap-Natalie-Wexler-audiobook/dp/B07TJ23BPS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+knowledge+gap&qid=1693523093&sprefix=the+knowl%2Caps%2C522&sr=8-1
Next point, Roland Fryer has demonstrated how to fix public schools, he did it with 20 of the lowest rated schools in Houston. He eliminated the racial achievement gaps within a couple of years. He
Changed personnel
Did frequent testing (every 3 weeks) if most of the class didn’t get the concept they would redo it. If just some didn’t get the concept put them in small tutoring groups till they got it.
High expectations/no excuses
https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
“our evidence on “how do you deal with recalcitrant principals?” is basically non-existent.
No it’s not. If you can’t convince them to get on board then fire them. Roland Fryer fired 19 of his 20 principles. You MUST have management alignment.
https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=learning+to+read+in+100+easy+lessons&qid=1693523160&sprefix=learning+to+read+in+%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1
(best book to teach your child to read)
IMHO kids aren't all the same. As we used to say a long time ago, different strokes for different folks.
Informative article
> in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons.
??? Ever since I learned about this issue I've been 200% on the pro-phonics side, and I kinda assumed I was as rabidly pro-phonics as anyone, but apparently not — this seems crazy!
"English-language spelling reform" is never going to happen, mostly because the language drift is so big and as a culture, we seem to have a tolerance for legitimizing errors, because the usage of the errors have grown so wide spread. It's only a matter of time before "would of" becomes an acceptable grammatical alternative to "would've".
I'd like to know how "of" got corrupted to sounding like "uv" in the first place.
It's because of the contraction "would've", very few people say "would have". Regarding "of", I think there are a lot of dialects on both sides of the pond that slur the F, for instance in sentences like "She's kind of a genius" or "He's sort of a bore". So for non-english or ESL speakers it is not a stretch for them to hear "would of" instead of "would've"
I also see people type "kind've" some times, the reverse phenomenon...
I'm talking about even outside of contractions, I've always heard the F get slurred into a V.
With all due respect to John McWhorter, being a “trained linguist” doesn't necessarily qualify one to have expertise on the best methods for elementary reading instruction. (I happen to think he's right though.)
To be fair McWhorter acknowledged that explicitly.
Slow Boring just warmed my heart by Matt saying he is spelling challenged - boy can I relate to that problem. My grade school days (1-6) were a long time ago, but I remenmber being given a list of words to memorize and then to take a test every Friday. I usally got an 'A'on Friday's test and by Saturday I forgotten how to spell the words. Nothing has changed except Spell Check has saved many of my posts.
I have always been a good reader and I can't remember exactly what was taught to me in schoool, but I can remember my mother and father working with me on my school work. I feel that involved parents are one the most importandt and overlooked qualities of a child's education. Involved parents can overcome many of the failures of public schooling - over crowding, disruptive students, and the over relience on standardized tests - it is as if one size fits all. IT DOESN'T. There should be, or must be be, an allowance for those learn slowly and those who are quicker. We shouldn't hold back the faster learners and at the same time, we shouldn't overlook those who are slower. Sometimes slower wins the race and faster go of the track.
I can not imagine how teachers can put with the actions of today's students as well as today's parents. I think if I were a teacher I wouldn't last the day, as I would be arrested for destruction of private property (cell phones) and sending children to detention (do they still have that?) for being disruptive in class.
Just the other day, I was stopped behind a school bus letting kids (around 10-12 years old) off the bus. I wached this one young lady get off the wearing her back pack (wish I had one in my day), she was wearing an ear piece and walking up the middle of street staring at her phone. Yes, it was in the subiurbs, but we do have sidewalks. As bad as that was, I have seen adults doing the same thing. Rarely do you see anyone walking, let alone walking without looking at their phone.
I'm not sure how long you've been reading Matt's work, but in his early blogging days he was well known for his spelling challenges.
Two words: "wide Latina" (I will never stop teasing Matt about that one, particularly as he didn't correct it even after about two billion people pointed it out).
The "three-cueing" method just seems crazy on its face. English spelling has rules (though lots of exceptions exist!), but "three-cueing" assumes that it doesn't, and teaches English as if it's spelled with a series of unique pictograms. Since that is not true, and fluency requires knowledges of thousands of words, this would never work! There is no known language that is spelled with unique pictograms because that would be impossible to keep straight.
The whole thing feels quite similar to other scientific frauds in the past.
I'm still pretty hung up on how that even happened in the first place.
Great article, making many critical points! The one thing I don’t understand is “Because there are so many schools, it’s inherently difficult to tell if the best schools are just random outliers. “ I think it’s just basic statistics that larger sample makes it easier to detect signal over random noise. Would it really be easier to tell if something worked if there were fewer schools? I can’t see how. Am I missing something here?
But again, minor point.
You're more likely to find a 7-foot person in a large population than a small one; same concept for schools and their performance. With a large population, you have a better idea what the average is, but also more examples that are far from the average, if only by luck.
No coverage of this subject seems to mention that reading is NOT like other academic subjects. Reading is a habit. You can teach all the phonics you like, but kids who don't have a habit of reading are going to fall way, way behind compared to kids who read habitually. Being a habitual reader is a lifestyle characteristic - children will be influenced far more by their parents' example than by their schooling.
In this regard, reading is more like physical education. Putting kids through half an hour of gym class three times a week might teach them the basics of how to play sports and be active, but kids who are habitually active are going to end up way fitter than kids who are habitually sedentary. This habit too is going to be almost entirely transmitted by parents.
But if we want schools to inculcate habits of reading to the extent that they can, it's very important not only that students learn *to* read, but also that they learn to *like* to read. Just as different kids are interested in different sports, different kids are interested in different types of reading. Some kids might want to read nothing but Mike Lupica, some kids might want to read nothing but Harry Potter, some kids might want to read nothing but News of the Weird - and all of that is fine! Any kid who wants to read anything on their own should be given time and space to do, because habitual independent reading beats everything else by a mile.
As a concrete policy I would argue for letting reading-competent kids test out of phonics instruction and use that time to independently read anything they like. This would allow reading-competent kids to work on their comprehension independently (and not be bored to tears by phonics lessons they don't need).
Possibly more importantly, it would also give less-skilled kids a massive incentive to work hard on being able to test out of phonics. In other words, "if I can learn this and pass that test, then I can read about dragons instead of Dick & Jane!" That there is a much more powerful incentive for an elementary schooler than any grade or test score.
The major goal of primary education should be to have children read as many words as possible, in any form.
And don't make them do reading logs, for the love of all that is holy. Reading logs make a joy into a chore.
Counterpoint: do the reading logs in during a fixed time period in class. Now all the kids who read have something to write about, but the ones who skipped it are bored out of their minds.
English spelling is very close to the pronunciation… of Henry VIII’s time. When night was pronounced ‘n-igght’, not ‘n-ite’. Very much the way it’s said in Lallans/ lowland Scots. Alas, spelling became regularized during the Great Vowel Shift.
I'm so glad you wrote this to give some nuance and context to the recent push for more phonics!
There's good evidence that children benefit from phonics instruction being embedded within texts that are engaging and meaningful, but doing that successfully with a large classroom is a lot harder than just doing phonics drills and requires a very skilled teacher.