If you haven’t yet listened to Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story, you probably should, now. It’s brilliant, if profoundly depressing. Very brief synopsis: the methods routinely used to teach children to read in the US don’t work well for large numbers of children, and the science of reading has been clear about this for decades. Three academics in particular — Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell of the Ohio State University — are responsible for promoting these bad practices (which are pervasive), and persisted in doing so long after the research was clear, and have gotten very rich (by the standards of academics) from the curriculum sales/speaking circuit.[1] Hanford’s documentary has single-handedly changed the environment, and in the past couple of years State departments of education and even school districts throughout the country have been scrabbling to reform, often under the eye of state legislators who have been alerted to the situation by the amount of chatter that Sold a Story has generated.
Although a great admirer of Hanford’s work, which I have known and followed for many years, it took me a while to listen to Sold a Story. By the time I did I was familiar with the basic narrative which, I think, freed my mind to wonder about something that Hanford doesn’t discuss. The role of academic bystanders. People like me.
Here’s the thing. I sometimes see things that colleagues elsewhere in the university do and think they might be intellectually in error. If you’re in a university, so do you. But there is, as in many professions, a very stringent norm of not rocking the boat. This is, in general, a good norm, because academia has more than its share of cranks, more than its share of arrogant shits, and, not coincidentally, more than its share of arrogant shit cranks. (I say more than its share: a higher proportion, anyway, than I encountered in the office furniture moving business, though maybe that field just had less than its share). So: norms that dis-embolden such people have their place. But: in this case, the science of reading has been so clear, for so long, and the practices that Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell peddle have been so damaging, that it might sensibly have been worth overcoming the norm. And the way universities work mean that a substantial amount of Fountas and Pinnell’s work will have been looked at, at least formally, by colleagues in other, but related, disciplines, deans, etc, over many many years.[2] It’s hard to believe — or at least its hard for me to believe — that nobody thought to themselves “the research designs here look very weak”/”the methods by which these results have been found look very dodgy”/”what the hell kind of research is supporting these recommendations which are, on their face, obviously bad?”. It’s easy to believe — or at least its easy for me to believe — that people would have thought those things and not taken action.[3]
There’s no conclusion here. Nor even an argument! Just a query really: what obligations do academics have to scrutinize the actions of colleagues who are operating outside of their immediate areas of expertise?
[1] Hanford doesn’t work out exactly how rich it has made them. But contacts in the publishing world suggest that a successful textbook in a large discipline can earn the author more than their annual salary (especially if they require it for their own large course): my guess is that the same is true for curriculum sales, especially because we are thinking about States and school districts here, not college classes. Maybe someone here can enlighten us.
[2] I single out Fountas and Pinnell because I know how their university works, much like mine. Teachers College is private, and only contains Education and related fields, as far as I know, so might be different.
[3] I was reminded of all this after a colleague excitedly walked into my office last week to tell me that Arthur Laffer was not only speaking on our campus the next day but was actually alive. He convinced the (brilliant) 21-year old student whom he interrupted that this was important enough to justify interrupting our meeting by talking with her about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. From a hurried email exchange with a friend who, unlike me, knew Laffer and, really unlike me, has seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I gather that Milton Friedman had the measure of Laffer.
{ 98 comments }
Kenny Easwaran 10.02.23 at 6:24 pm
People have sometimes made similar claims about what academics in other fields should have done, with regards to things like the replication crisis in psychology and related social sciences, and with string theory in physics. Many academics tried to do the same thing during the rise of “theory” in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s. While it’s possible that some of these interventions would have done some good, it seems just as likely to me that some of these interventions would represent a kind of attempted hostile takeover of other academic disciplines by academics who don’t understand the actual value of work within the discipline. How does one know when a discipline really is going off the deep end, and when a discipline has developed methods that do actually work, in ways that practitioners of other disciplines don’t understand?
John Q 10.02.23 at 7:25 pm
I didn’t realise US academics were still allowed to set their own textbooks as required reading. This is forbidden at the University of Queensland, and I think at most other Australian universities.
Scott P. 10.02.23 at 8:04 pm
John Q: what does one do if there is only one textbook and you have written it?
Harry 10.02.23 at 9:02 pm
Kenny — yes, I suppose that’s part of what I’m thinking (as a defense of doing nothing — and of the ‘don’t rock the boat’ norm which I think is basically benign).
This case is complicated by the fact that the methods they recommended have long been thoroughly rejected by the people who do the science, which is by its nature interdisciplinary. They really had (and still have) no science at all to back up what they’re doing, and when you see their defenses it is embarrassing. I imagine coming across their work, say in a tenure file, finding it fishy, then exploring the sciences and discovering the state of things (say in 1999), and then… well, in all likelihood deciding to abide by the prevailing norms.
Harry 10.02.23 at 9:06 pm
“This is forbidden at the University of Queensland, and I think at most other Australian universities.”
Yeah, its very common here. When Erik Wright assigned his books he got the local (left wing) bookstore to sell them at a discount which amounted to his royalty, and he would then pay that amount out of pocket to the bookstore himself, which seems like an ok practice, but the students thought it was very eccentric.
EB 10.02.23 at 9:36 pm
There is the science, and then there is the culture of Education departments in universities and in school districts. The science has, indeed, been piling up for over 60 years — my favorite accessible book on the topic is Stanislas Dehaene’s “Reading in the Brain.” Dehaenew is a neuroscientist. In Ed departments and many school districts, the temptation to view children through a romantic lens (where their natural desire to learn overcomes almost everything), has been strong. Curricula that promote systematic instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, and so forth seem dry to this school of thought. Apealing to children’s imaginations and exposing them to a lot of literature seems like a more humane way to teach. Which, of course, you can still do on top of phonics instruction because good phonics instruction is very efficient as doesn’t take much time in the instructional day.
PatinIowa 10.02.23 at 9:42 pm
Donovan Ochs, who taught Rhetoric at Iowa for many years, believed that his was the only decent public speaking textbook out there. People more qualified than I agreed with him. So, he assigned it.
This was a long time ago, and I have no idea if his calculations were accurate: He figured his royalty on each book sold was about 21 cents, so he’d take a roll of quarters to the first class and reimburse the students who had bought the textbook new.
Never hurts to get them laughing during the first class.
DCA 10.02.23 at 9:42 pm
One related question that has puzzled me about this is, where were the many, many, schools of education that the US contains? Some of them are part of research universities, and Harry’s comments notwithstanding, one way to get academic kudos at such a place is to convincingly show that some existing theory is wrong. It would seem that there was enough evidence around (from other disciplines) that some group in education could have made their own careers by showing that Calkins was wrong–why didn’t this happen?
I can say that the “how to teach reading” fight is of very long standing: my parents told me that I benefited by having a first-grade teacher who taught a little phonics despite the school policy (this was 1950’s California). I also remember, much later, being told that New Zealand had benefited because, against everyone else, they had a reading program that avoided all the rote learning of phonics–I believe this was Calkins’ intellectual ancestor. It almost seems like religions……
hix 10.02.23 at 10:34 pm
Just assigning ones own textbook, harmless. One could also sell the book with a code that allows online access to a database of multiple choice questions for only one term. The very same multiple choice questions out of which the final test will be randomly constructed. Then one could hold lectures with about 5 of 700 students mandated to do the exam attending, because everybody knows the only way to properly prepare is to memorize the multiple choice database.
Matt 10.02.23 at 11:38 pm
In Australian law schools, at least, it’s not uncommon for professors to assign case/text books that they are among the authors of. (Many, perhaps most, of these are large multi-author affairs.)
On the main topic, it seems relevant to me that primary school teachers have tended to have mroe support for “whole language” reading instruction not least because it’s a lot less tedious than teaching reading by phonetics. The fact that it works very poorly compared to the more tedious method doesn’t seem to have been able to overcome this difference. (I’m thinking about this to a higher degree now because I’ve just learned of the death of my former “local” boss and mentor from when I was in the Peace Corps, who was the long-term director of the English language department at the Ryazan State Pedagogical University in Ryazan, Russia. He’d develped methods by which even middling instructors could teach even middling students English better than the vast majority of university langauge majors in the US learn their subject. But, it involved a large amount of drilling, repetition (“repetition is the mother of learnign” is an old Russian phrase), and discipline. It wasn’t very “fun”, but even the less good students learned English pretty well, and the best ones were fluent, or very close to it, in a few years, despite limited contact with native speakers.)
Fake Dave 10.03.23 at 1:03 am
There are upsides to profs assigning their own books. They can tailor the book precisely to their instructional needs and, especially in niche subjects, provide an alternative to available texts that are overbroad, incomplete, or out of date. The practice also has the virtue of supporting solid academic work from low-profile authors with limited market value who lose out in the “star system” of academic publishing. The likelihood of at least one teacher actually using the book helps tamp down concerns about lack of demand and return on investment that can keep good works out of the hands of students.
Unfortunately, the ability of academic publishers to treat the authors’ own students as a primary (and captive) market has led to a distinct lack of quality control, frequent flooding of the market, and a sad tendency to skimp on marketing and shift the task of promoting books onto the teachers themselves. More good, interesting books might get printed, but are often left to die on the vine while higher status academics dominate the big survey courses and the specialists all seem to be pushing their own book. The way this dovetails with a general increase in the cost of books and the number of books assigned is predictably awful for students.
Aubergine 10.03.23 at 4:35 am
One of the particularly pernicious things about “whole language” and “balanced literacy” methods is that they seem to work well, for a while. They get kids to engage with books in an easy, relaxed way, without the drilling of phonics (painful for everyone involved), and kids who find reading really difficult can make quick progress. They’re reading, right? That has to be worth something! They only run into problems later when it turns out that they haven’t been taught to read, just to pretend to read.
There’s also evidence that “balanced literacy” isn’t just ineffective, it’s actively harmful because the strategies it teaches (of looking for “cues” like pictures, context and theme to guess meaning) get in the way of actually learning to read difficult words, at least for some children. So if you take a child who has learned to pretend to read through cueing and try to teach them properly, they won’t make much progress until they’ve unlearned their harmful coping techniques.
That has a lot to do with the longevity of these failed models of reading instruction – teachers who only teach children for a year or two will see the short-term gains but not the long-term harm; then, when the kids can’t get away with pretending any more, teaching them remedial phonics is a hard uphill slog.
Add to that a whole pile of institutional inertia, strong personalities with the right connections, effective marketing and a lot of educational authorities with a lot of sunk cost and it’s not surprising that academics in other disciplines have had a hard time breaking through. They’ve been trying for a long time – phonics vs whole language and similar methods has been a battlefield since I was at school (which was, well, some time ago) – but maybe Hanford’s work was the tipping point the field needed.
John Q 10.03.23 at 5:19 am
Fake Dave @11
I wanted to lecture out of my own book so I made it available to the students as a free PDF. Those who wanted the tactile experience could buy it, but I don’t think many did even though it only cost $25
Alan White 10.03.23 at 6:16 am
I taught thousands of students in my 101 class using my incomplete text that focused on free will as a way to understand how philosophy critically integrates information from all sorts of areas–ethics, law, science–and I always provided it as a text sold in the bookstore for the cost of printing, or later free as a pdf. I now have a real co-edited text that I would never require even if I were still teaching (I’d provide PDFs of my contributions if I were). Profiting off ones classes through text assignments just seems wrong to me, though I know we are talking about typically paltry amounts of money as royalties (though Copi (RIP) probably might have disagreed with his incredible logic texts).
My local school board has become MAGA dominated, and pushes SFA (success for all) curriculum, which has dubious objective claim for its moniker by data, and as well a suspicious political agenda. Ever since vouchers were started in Milwaukee in the 90s and have expanded almost exponentially since thanks to friendly court decisions that seem to me to violate the separation of church and state, anything like truly objective research in the interest of the public good in what was once dominantly and truly public education has become intransigently politicized in an effective attempt to marginalize it. It’s not about reason–it’s all about emotive manipulation to ensure the dominance of capital and mostly caucasian males and anyone identifying with them.
TM 10.03.23 at 8:03 am
“This case is complicated by the fact that the methods they recommended have long been thoroughly rejected by the people who do the science”
You are saying that these authors were rejected within their own field. But then I don’t understand the issue. Why didn’t the “gate-keepers” within the field do their job?
Lameen 10.03.23 at 10:26 am
Thanks both for the link and for the broader query!
This problem goes far beyond the English-speaking world; I was shocked a few years ago to find out that Algerian primary school textbooks had dropped phonics in favour of a whole-word reading approach, despite the fact that, unlike English, Arabic sound-letter mappings are almost perfectly transparent – much more so, indeed, than the relationship between Standard Arabic and what people actually speak outside the classroom. (I posted about it here if you’re interested: http://lughat.blogspot.com/2016/08/phonics-and-whole-word-teaching-in.html ). Is there any worldwide study of the history of this approach, I wonder?
J, not that one 10.03.23 at 12:21 pm
I’m not surprised the pendulum between the phonics and anti-phonics people is still swinging. (I am surprised that there are any schools today that don’t teach phonics even if they use one of the other curriculums as well.) When I started school the teacher was still drawing outlines around words – that’s what “whole language” meant then. It also meant repetitive “See Jack run” and nothing else for years. By the next year it was all phonics. I’ve found the press coverage of this newest controversy a bit confusing as the reporters seem offended in some way by fairly innocuous aspects of contemporary classrooms, like the existence of lots of books at different levels, and the practice of teaching about the elements of different kinds of text, or an emphasis on writing alongside of reading. Maybe these are, ironically, more fun to write about than more technical aspects. I don’t expect this will change anything very much. Good teachers will continue to be good teachers, teachers who feel comfortable letting large numbers of kids fall by the wayside will continue to do little for them. Most will continue to use a mix of theoretical approaches as seems appropriate.
Trader Joe 10.03.23 at 12:57 pm
I think the difficulty in this case is that there was a separation between the “gate keepers” who understood the data and the actual users of the methodology. School administrators by reflex don’t value having academics tell them how to do their job (probably true in a lot of fields).
School administrators have only one job and that’s ultimately to cover their butt. If the orthodoxy is to do a certain thing it takes incredible bravery for a butt covering administrator to say “no we will do this different thing” because if the different thing doesn’t produce immediate results they get fired whereas if they do the stupid thing that’s always been done and it produces the same lousy results they keep their job. Its unfortunately that simple.
Add to that the perverse reward system that says that school districts get more government funding if they seem to be lagging and there is yet one more reason to not try to achieve outside the norm even if the norm is unacceptable.
Its the large consequences version of “if all your friends jumped off a bridge would you do it too” we all know intuitively its stupid to do that, but there is incredible pressure to stay within the herd and do what it does even if its wrong.
A very useful piece. Thanks for alerting to the valuable podcast.
Harry 10.03.23 at 1:34 pm
“You are saying that these authors were rejected within their own field. But then I don’t understand the issue. Why didn’t the “gate-keepers” within the field do their job?”
I think EB at 6 explains it better than I. Basically this is a case (which is pretty normal I suppose) in which the people developing the curriculums and the the materials are not really in the same field as the people doing the science. That’s fair enough, because curriculum development is really hard, and requires entirely different skills from doing science of learning. [Analogue: people who write history textbooks are often not historians, which is fine]. But in this case, as DCA intimates, one single person in NZ came up with a theory that was not tested, before there was really definitive science, and Calkins et al took up the theory and sort of based everything around it. And as the science emerged they ignored it. In the podcast it does sound very much like a religion (again as DCA says). I do not believe that is a consequence of selective journalism: I fully trust Hanford’s journalism, having followed her work for a decade and a half, and knowing how well she reports issues that I know a lot about (and, full disclosure, I’ve known her most of that time and regard her as a friend).
J, not that one 10.03.23 at 1:46 pm
To be clear, as @19 seems directed at what I wrote, by “journalism” I mean writing by professional journalists in mainstream outlets. The New York Times has been writing about Hanford quite a lot, in particular. I don’t mean writing by academics for the public.
Rob Chametzky 10.03.23 at 2:41 pm
Yes indeed, EB@6 does explain a portion of the situation well and succinctly. While Dehaene is very good, I recommend Harry’s colleague at Wisconsin/Madison Mark Seidenberg–a psycholinguist/cognitive scientist whose work includes the ‘popular’ 2017 book on reading “Language at the speed of sight”–for those seeking a (much) more in depth account of the relations between basic science and schooling in area of reading. Here’s a link to his website on reading:
https://seidenbergreading.net/
–RC
Rob Chametzky 10.03.23 at 2:58 pm
On professors assigning their own (text)books in their classes:
One of my graduate school teachers used to use his own logic textbook in his graduate classes in the linguistics department. It was (and remains) a deeply idiosyncratic book, covering many more topics than in most “logic” texts and employing non-standard formal choices.
He bought copies from his publisher (the press at the university) at his author’s discounted price and sold them from his office to students at that price. This was well before PDFs.
–Rob Chametzky
maxhgns 10.03.23 at 3:43 pm
What boggles my mind is how anyone who can read and write English could think that this kind of instruction would work. It’s not like written English is pictographic. You should also be able to figure out that it’s easier to memorize the sounds associated with 26 letters (and how they combine) than to memorize the appearance of hundreds of thousands of discrete words.
Or, you know. That when you cover up the word it can’t be read (indeed, you should have the experience of not being good at reading covered up words for yourself!). Or that if you’re “reading” a book in Danish but what’s coming out of your mouth are English words, you’re not reading Danish. Or that the difference between ‘horse’ and ‘pony’ is significant. Or… well, the list goes on.
It’s truly horrifying.
Slanted Answer 10.03.23 at 3:51 pm
Regarding obligations academics might have: One thing I did see responsible academics doing when I was in school (both at the undergraduate and graduate level) was steering (sometimes quite subtly) advisees/students away from faculty/disciplines that they knew pretty clearly to be producing dubious work. I don’t know if any of these people rocked the boat in other ways, but they did seem to feel obligated to help protect students from bad work to some degree.
I do wonder how all of this relates to the highly controversial practice of hoaxing disciplines. My sense is that the Sokal hoax in the 1990s may have done some good by bringing wider attention to the egregious work being done in fields influenced by postmodernist thought. The more recent hoaxing attempts seemed much less successful and more dubious. (Although I’m not sure how ethical the Sokal hoax was either.)
Peter Dorman 10.03.23 at 5:05 pm
The central question Harry is asking takes us to the basis for the modern university, the siloing of knowledge and teaching into distinct, largely autonomous departments. I think the underlying reason academics hesitate to criticize work in other fields is a kind of Westphalian maintenance.
Of course, while there are huge benefits from parceling out the work this way, knowledge overlaps, often sprawling across disciplines. In the phonics-vs-whole-reading example, this is intrinsically interdisciplinary, and a broad swath of academics outside the ed schools are qualified to assess it.
I’ve experienced this issue first hand from teaching at a school where interdisciplinary teams are standard (Evergreen State College). What do you do if you’re an economist and the cultural studies prof assigns a book that says that Keynes was a colonial administrator in India, which shows how his theories are “colonizing”? In fact, even in these close quarters the norm was to keep your mouth shut. From what I could tell, part of that was deference to the silo structure and part avoiding the unpleasantness that a critical reaction would probably bring.
Those of you who follow Andrew Gelman’s blog will recognize that he holds institutions at least somewhat accountable for the academic misbehavior (or shoddy work) they tolerate until they don’t: Harvard for Hauser, Stanford for the Great Barrington crew, Cornell for Wansink, etc. It’s complicated, but I think he has a case.
otto 10.03.23 at 5:17 pm
I think one alternative approach is academics working in the field writing “real takedown” reviews of prominent scholarship / textbooks i.e. not “polite ‘not impressed’ book reviews” but full-throated (knowledgeable) smackdowns.
Those too are sometimes “frowned on” but actually can provide a genuine academic and public service.
Tim Worstall 10.03.23 at 5:37 pm
One of the things I seem to recall from the UK is that this became a political issue. Tories were phonics, Labour whole word. Which sounds absurd in those terms. But I’m really sure I do recall it being a political issue, even if not quite so party based.
Yet people tell me that politics – that truly democratic economy and all that – is the way we should run everything.
TF79 10.03.23 at 6:25 pm
If you had asked a priori which disciplines would you expect to see this in, education would probably be at or near the top of my list. Perhaps this is what Kenny warns against in (1), but I have generally been underwhelmed by the empirical research coming out of education departments. And while I’m sensitive to field-specific difference and what is and isn’t valuable to a discipline, education is often using the same sorts of data that social scientists or public health or whatever are using. So I think there is some scope for outside academics to raise critiques given the overlap in methodologies (e.g policy evaluation)
Cynthianne 10.03.23 at 6:27 pm
I am commenting because I learned to read phonetically, but not in school- my grandfather read to me for hours daily from age 3 on, and by the time I hit first grade I was reading at essentially adult level. Perhaps one can argue that I was linguistically gifted. Mebbe, but 20 years later I taught my severely dyslexic son to read using phonetics (didn’t know about “sight reading” at the time). I always thought of kiddo’s problem as “letter and word blindness.” He simply could not recognize or copy letters or words. They would fall apart on the page.
I started by holding his hand and writing, in script, a letter over and over while saying the letter each time. Yes, I taught him script, rather than printing. He could not print. After letters, went on to words. And all the time I read to him nightly, one or two hours at bedtime. Started just reading until he was sleepy, then reading a sentence and asking him to read it after me, then a paragraph, then a page. Never tried to teach him phonemes- just read, read, read.
Due to his disability, it took quite a while- over five years before he was reading adequately on his own, by the fourth grade, I think. Maybe if I had training in teaching phonetics it would have gone faster? Who knows?
I really do not understand why teaching kids “see and say” would be faster and/or easier than teaching phonetics. Since when is reading to your students and kids or grandkids a chore? That’s what teachers, parents and grandparents are for!
Harry 10.03.23 at 7:02 pm
“One of the things I seem to recall from the UK is that this became a political issue. Tories were phonics, Labour whole word. Which sounds absurd in those terms. But I’m really sure I do recall it being a political issue, even if not quite so party based.”
I also recall it being left/right valenced, though not really partisan in that way (thinking of Labour shadow ministers pre-97 and ministers post-97 I am sure none of them would have had much sympathy with balanced literacy, eg).
But… about twenty years ago Erik Olin Wright (my deceased Marxist friend and colleague), I think in the wake of the (excellent, but doomed) Bush administration initiative that Hanford talks about in the podcast) expressed exasperation, dismay but also genuine puzzlement, that reading instruction, an issue that is fundamentally technical, should have become political. Its a sign of something gone seriously wrong. (More recently: same thing with extended school closures, though in that case Trump’s demand to “Open all the schools” was deliberate and predictably effective attempt to wrongfoot liberals, whereas the Bush initiative was, I think, made in good faith).
Harry 10.03.23 at 7:08 pm
I sort of taught my first two children to read at the normal age. My third struggled, and was pulled out into a reading recovery program that probably did him more harm than good. He’s ok now. When I was 18 I volunteered in a rural primary school for several months and worked with a 10 year old who couldn’t read. It never would have occurred to me not to use phonics (I share maxhgns’ amazement that anyone could think anything else could work). The problem was that all the books in the school that were for beginning readers were for 5 year olds, and boring for 10 year olds (probably not thrilling for 5 year olds to be honest). So I wrote my own stories for him (short, silly, really tailored to his personality), and he learned fast. The luxury of one-on-one tutoring. Wish I’d kept the stories!
Dr. Hilarius 10.03.23 at 10:12 pm
What maxhgns at 23 said. I’ve watched the phonics vs. whole word battle for nearly a half century along with steady declines in reading ability in the US.
Tim Worstall notes the partisan divide in the UK. It’s the same in the US with phonics being identified with conservatives and home schooling while whole word has been championed by schools of education and some sub-set of liberals. I suspect the advocacy of conservatives for phonics has acted to produce reflexive resistance to phonics in some quarters.
While it’s useful to have “brain science” claiming to validate phonics, it’s never been necessary. Watching children struggling to read unknown words rather than sounding them out is evidence enough. But I really appreciate this post for the history and background.
J, not that one 10.03.23 at 10:20 pm
My understanding is that this is different from “see and say.” See and Say involved lists of words that were all in the “reader.” In the curriculum I’m familiar with (no idea if it’s considered balanced literacy but I’m guessing yes), kids might be given books with either no words, or with words it’s known they can’t read (this is for kids who are pre-reading or very early readers — my reading-two-grades-ahead kid was not given books she couldn’t read but was allowed to read almost at the edge of what had been determined to be the hardest book that grade would have), and they were paired up to tell each other what’s going on in the book. If they could read, they read the book. If not, they narrated the pictures. I don’t know how much these teachers encouraged actual guessing. I’d think baby books with a picture of red things and the word “red” are a kind of word recognition, apart from any phonics.
They were all Common Core, there’s a unit on nonfiction and a unit on poetry and a unit on fairy tales or myths, but they didn’t all read the same books in the same grade (at least in reading class). In nonfiction in particular, starting very early, they had to ask themselves what they knew about a subject and what they expected the book to tell them, and then afterward what they learned. Maybe this should have been left for later and they should have had more specific questions? It sounded to me like “what do we know about this” could get a little wild. I don’t know how much that stuck into high school, but it seems like a useful strategy to me.
There are “recognition words” which as far as I could tell simply meant the words they were expected to read easily at that grade level.
I can see situations where, say, a kid who speaks only Portuguese at home might not be noticed as struggling until second or third grade – but that’s a matter of low expectations and lack of ESOL resources especially for kids who can converse in English fairly fluently but have no English-language resources at home. I do wonder how much help a normal English phonics program would help in a class that was 60% children of recent immigrants with phonemes that are very different? I can see where a teacher who thought something like a guessing stage was normal would allow a kid to stay in that “stage” until it wasn’t normal anymore but there was less to be done about it.
The fact that any teacher could think guessing is a strategy to be encouraged with enthusiasm – in any subject – is more concerning to me. Or could think “this child has a second grade skill in kindergarten; she must have missed important stage and we should force her to go back and guess as is age-appropriate.” At least most K-2 teachers know what success in reading looks like; in math most of them obviously have no idea. But these aren’t ideas the reading curriculum is responsible for.
J, not that one 10.03.23 at 10:30 pm
Sorry for the double post, but I meant to add that thinking a guessing stage is normal for seven year olds is no different, really from thinking it’s not but that you don’t have to worry until age eight or nine when a kid is making no progress. And I got the strong sense that teachers thought second grade (which these days is close to nine) is the average age for learning to read: the goal they should be working toward with a couple years fudge factor for the other half of the curve.
That would be in line with the clear message from the curriculum that being able to add and subtract doesn’t have to be accomplished before the same age: not that it should be introduced earlier, with some given time to catch up or learn more slowly, but that it should not be introduced before then.
J-D 10.03.23 at 11:22 pm
Some parents and grandparents are themselves unable to read, or can read only with difficulty. How did this not occur to you?
Fake Dave 10.03.23 at 11:47 pm
A lot of the left/right politicization probably isn’t about reading per se but rather about authoritarian versus collabotative teaching styles. Most of us have had the experience of being bullied by teachers who fixated on a singular “proper” technique that they force by rote and drill incessantly the same way every time until it becomes a humilating chore for the kids who aren’t getting it. For me that was handwriting. I was always slower and sloppier than the other kids, my hand cramped painfully and being singled out for extra “help” felt more like punishment and seemed to things worse. Many years later, I learned that my experience was shared by many other kids who had my hypermobilty and hitch-hiker’s thumb. The two “acceptable” grips we had been forced to use and blamed for deviating from were inappropriate and all the remedial aids meant to force a “firm” hand like rubber grips and softer pencils really did make things worse. They never tried giving me a pen.
I suspect that many other kids hit the same wall with reading that I did with writing and as adults associate phonics with tedious rote learning from small-minded classroom tyrants who take the joy out of learning and don’t respect diverse learning styles. The “whole language” approach held the promise of ending all that pain and shame by just getting kids reading and making it fun for them, although it seems like kids lit pioneers Judy Bloom and R. L. Stein did far more for reluctant readers than the academics. Of course, for other people, rigor, discipline, rewarding skill, and punishing poor performers are the whole point of school.
mw 10.04.23 at 4:53 pm
Poorly supported educational innovations / fads are hardly limited to phonics. The same battles (with approximately the same political battle lines) exist for math as well (learning multiplication tables, learning ‘long division’). These kinds of battles are very old, of course. There’s Tom Lehrer’s New Math. And I was once amused to see what is apparently a complaint about an educational fad in Mary Gaskell’s North and South (1855). In this scene Margaret returns to visit the classroom where she once taught (but that is now instructed by the new Vicar’s wife):
LFC 10.04.23 at 6:55 pm
Haven’t read all the comments here, but chiming in to say that a while ago I heard, by chance on the car radio one day, a part of the Sold a Story podcast. Not really having known anything about its subject, I was astounded. The notion that someone could think that a good way to teach children how to read is to cover up (i.e., hide) the next word in a sentence and have them guess at what the word might be just boggled my mind.
P.s. When I was at the age when one learns (or is supposed to learn) to read, I was living with my (American) family in what was then East Pakistan (Bangladesh now). My memories are very fragmentary at best, but I think I started in an American school and wasn’t doing that well, and my parents then put me in a British-run school. Had a strict teacher who rapped students on the knuckles (not British; I think she might have been Dutch), but I did learn to read. I’m sure the methods were not the discredited ones described in the podcast — probably they hadn’t been “invented” yet.
John Q 10.04.23 at 7:55 pm
As Tim W and others have observed, phonics is one of the few culture war issues where the scientific evidence has been on the side of the political right. But while teachers have pushed back against phonics, the cause hasn’t been adopted by the left in general. The result has been a gradual retreat, where strong versions of “whole language” and similar ideas have been abandoned, in favour of weaker versions that claim to incorporate phonics (though they may not do so in classroom practice). Here’s a current statement of the position
https://theconversation.com/reading-is-more-than-sounding-out-words-and-decoding-thats-why-we-use-the-whole-language-approach-to-teaching-it-126606
John Q 10.04.23 at 9:06 pm
The “initial success” story works both ways. Apart from a brief exposure to New Math (the teachers were just as flummoxed as we were), I got the traditional drill-based education. Everyone learned to read, but the majority were eager to leave school at the earliest legal age (14 in those days). AFAICT, most never opened another book from the day they walked out the gate. Those who stayed to the end of high school would probably have learned to read regardless of the teaching method.
M Caswell 10.05.23 at 12:10 am
On the one hand, the podcast argues that one should trust in the authority of scientific research. On the other hand, it argues that educators’ claims can be evaluated by reflecting on what one thinks reading really is or is not, using amateur common sense. The latter point is much more interesting than the first, I think.
LFC 10.05.23 at 2:41 am
The piece JQ links @39 does not sound, at least to me (as someone w no background in the field) all that unreasonable, but as JQ implies, a lot likely depends on how a “mixed” approach is actually implemented in the classroom.
craig fritch 10.05.23 at 2:42 am
I am a retired elementary teacher. I taught Whole Language and have never regretted that. My kids read books and did a lot of writing. I used to use a book: “Professor Phonics Gives Sound Advice”. I stood at the blackboard that was covered with “cat, sat. rat. etc. and drilled my 32 kids. Didnt take long. My experience subbing ( 80 years old next summer) is that phonics means worksheets with pictures and 3 word choices. Its mostly a test of picture identification.
I really wonder about working from neurological research. Seems an infatuation with technology. Impresses folks, but maybe not teachers?
Neville Morley 10.05.23 at 6:31 am
The politicisation of the issue in the UK over the last twenty years is such that I feel an instinctive shudder at the word ‘phonics’, despite knowledge of the research behind it. The policy was promoted by politicians not just as a neutral best practice but in what we’d now call culture war terms – “WE are promoting Science-based policy unlike those trendy quasi-Marxists with their wishy-washy feelings” – but still more came as a package with a whole load of education stuff that manifestly wasn’t based in any research (promotion of free schools, abandoning coursework in favour of traditional unseen exams, generalised attacks on entire teaching profession) that then tainted the elements that had some merit.
As for the ‘academic bystander’ issue, part of the calculation must be whether criticism would make the slightest difference, given established hierarchies, and therefore whether it’s worth the trouble. This may not be relevant, as it’s not about ‘science’ in a strong sense, but I think of Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides’s Trap’ theory of the dynamic of US-China relations. This is grounded in a superficial and ignorant reading of Thucydides to which no self-respecting classicist would give the time of day, and an approach to the use of historical analogy to which only Niall Ferguson would give the time of day, and people have pointed this out – and the idea sails on imperviously. Obviously Allison isn’t going to pay any attention to grumbling humanities scholars, but it’s not obvious that anyone else is either – in which case someone in the same university might indeed conclude that it’s better not to get a reputation for lack of collegiality.
lurker 10.05.23 at 7:19 am
‘Is there any worldwide study of the history of this approach, I wonder?’ Lameen, 16
The French appear to have a similar debate: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/methode-globale-methode-syllabique-100-ans-de-debat-pour-rien-1492813
MJG 10.05.23 at 3:38 pm
I am surprised by the amount of disinformation in pushing phonics (and trashing balanced programs like Reading Recovery). Just because something calls itself the “science of reading) does not mean it is science. Science is usually defined in education as results of Randomized Control Trials. These are very hard to accomplish with something like reading (and especially find statistically significant results) because of the variables. However, in a very short period of time I was able to find a large RCT for Reading Recovery and a meta-analysis of studies (this is not my field but it still only took a few minutes).
RCT
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0162373718764828?casa_token=dQ2lvHi2ZJ0AAAAA:QsXD-9O2bCWLsCGv5GnrRWSL3YI7I-sxQ4tdrsmGgZ7kqfkA_rPi_GwXtE9tf0NzNJJwebaSHcI
MA
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y?fbclid=IwAR1uqRTXozQ5L_9ZIHtFsoMl9zGmbo8S63yum_-WroS9nYVdg7Jg7peDyvs
I believe there is a strong political authoritarian component to the strong push for total phonics. People should not be pushing misinformation that plays into this.
J, not that one 10.05.23 at 4:13 pm
It seems I incorrectly assumed that Hanford was the academic whom the NYT had been promoting as the leader of the anti-balanced literacy push. I can’t find that woman’s information however, only a bunch of articles foregrounding parents’ complaints after they got more involved with the school process during COVID. I’ll keep looking.
marcel proust 10.05.23 at 6:41 pm
@LFC: The notion that someone could think that a good way to teach children how to read is to cover up (i.e., hide) the next word in a sentence and have them guess at what the word might be just boggled my mind.
I dunno. Isn’t this pretty close to how ChatGPT was trained? Seems to have worked pretty well there, no? ;)
Stephen 10.05.23 at 7:46 pm
It is not easy to exceed my ignorance of Chinese, but as far as I can tell there is no obvious way of applying phonics to their multitude of written characters, in which neither the pronunciation nor the meaning can be reliably deduced from the shape. In that case, learning to read and write Chinese must be a matter of whole-word learning: is that so? And if that is so, what are the implications for Chinese literacy, and for the status and work-load of Chinese schoolteachers?
John Q 10.06.23 at 2:25 am
Marcel @48 That very thought had occurred to me, but you beat me to the punch. To venture an answer, ChatGPT was exposed to vast amount of language in its training. I could imagine that for children, the ability to guess the next word would be limited to very simple sentences. That would explain initial success with the method, followed by failure
KT2 10.06.23 at 5:24 am
Glanced over an article this week on current ML / AI LLM researchers making small models w children’s books to assist them in understanding what is inbetween your prompt, and AI LLM’s output. As even the experts don’t quite know. Still.
Nothing knew under the sun.
“Facebook’s AI is learning by reading loads of children’s books
By Aviva Rutkin
25 February 2016
…
It’s a reading list for fledgling AI (see box below). Training its AI on these books is part of what Facebook calls the Children’s Book Test, a method of gauging how well a computer understands what it’s reading.”
..
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078821-facebooks-ai-is-learning-by-reading-loads-of-childrens-books/
Peter T 10.06.23 at 11:33 am
Stephen
Chinese characters have a phonetic as well as an ideographic meaning, and there are a limited number of root characters (‘radicals’). But Chinese children begin by learning Chinese written in Latin script, and then progress to characters. Japanese children begin with the syllabaries and then progress to kanji. In both cases, high levels of literacy seem to be achieved without too great a burden.
MrMr 10.06.23 at 1:48 pm
Proust @48 and JQ@50–
ChatGPT is great at taking seven words and guessing an eighth that would make sense. But constructing a sentence extension that would make sense is not the same task as reading the sentence in front of you. If you have an eight word sentence, a literate person will be able to read it with near-perfect success rates by looking at every word. If you give ChatGPT the first seven words and ask it to guess the eighth, it will always give you a sentence that makes sense, but it will not always give you the sentence in front of you. Indeed it can’t, because the first seven words of a sentence underdetermine the eighth—there is no general method for always correctly guessing an obscured word, in contrast to the method of looking at it and reading it.
EB 10.06.23 at 3:12 pm
MJG@46 —
No one proposes all phonics and nothing but phonics. The point that “science of reading” proponents make is that phonics done systematically is a foundation that cannot be skipped, for most children. A good phonics curriculum is not endless drills; it is not time consuming; it can be enjoyable for the children, and it leaves plenty of time for additional literacy activities.
LFC 10.06.23 at 7:55 pm
Marcel P. @48
As I said above, I know nothing about the scientific foundations of this controversy (if that’s the right word).
With that significant disclaimer, it would seem to me that context is indeed important, but so is, if I can put it crudely, being able to decipher or “decode” a word one has never seen. Since beginning readers will have seen relatively few words, they have to learn that skill, along with the importance of context and meaning. Or so I would think. That would argue against a total X approach, whether the X is phonics or the whole-language thing.
All that said, I did find the radio version of the podcast to be quite astounding.
As for ChatGPT, and I know you were being somewhat facetious, it seems to me disanalogous bc ChatGPT is not human and it’s not reading as humans do. So it’s not doing whatever physiological and cognitive things humans do when they read.
J, not that one 10.06.23 at 10:23 pm
My daughter’s school used what I assume is a variety of “balanced literacy” as well as phonics. The backlash in this case seems to risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Fountas and Pinnell don’t only have a curriculum, what they’re well known for is a set of criteria for leveling books (that are not generally published as textbooks, that is if you buy from Scholastic their books will be labeled with a F&P or similar letter grade that goes from A well past Z). It isn’t clear to me whether their criteria are being challenged. They seem uncontroversial and even phonics-adjacent to me.
Complaints about “wallowing in books that are too easy” sound like old-fashioned complaints about the newfangled methods to me. I don’t even know what that one means. The old method, using basal readers, was to have everyone reading the same book at the same time, at most to have most reading one book and a couple the easier and harder. I see a lot about how the anti-phonics people don’t like seeing kindergarteners and first graders sitting in rows looking at the board. But doing that would be impossible for more than a 10-minute “mini-lesson” (the pro-phonics people seem to hate the idea of a mini-session, or kids sitting on the floor or reading in comfy nooks) if you have multiple small groups, with assistant teachers and reading specialists and so on helping each one.
If it’s true that most children are not learning to read, that’s so appalling the story should be much, much bigger than an occasional page 5 update.
(FWIW, I remember between 10 and 15 years ago, a teacher in NY state complaining to me they were at that time being moved away from “stations” and toward sitting in rows, with everyone doing the same work, and so on.)
J-D 10.06.23 at 11:44 pm
That’s fascinating. I have never heard that before.
Obviously there must have been an earlier period when this was not the case, and some different method must have been used, and I imagine it was replaced because it was harder than the method now used.
The change must have powerful implications for the future evolution of Chinese language.
maxhgns 10.07.23 at 6:20 am
J, not that one:
Part of what’s revealed in the podcast is that part of the problem is that very levelling scale, and the method used to score them. The scoring methodology turns out to be bunkum. Worse, their assessment materials do worse than a coin flip at diagnosing problems (such as dyslexia). Children end up bouncing from E to J to B again from one day to the next.
The infuriating thing is that good assessment and scoring materials exist and are free. These cost districts tens of thousands of dollars.
maxhgns 10.07.23 at 6:27 am
Let me add: apparently, the Fountas and Pinnell reading levels are determined based on themes, content, and the illustrations. Not the difficulty of sounding out the words.
Read that last sentence again, and weep.
Stephen 10.07.23 at 8:24 am
Peter T, J-D
Agreed, it is fascinating and surprising that Chinese children start by learning a Western alphabet, in order to be taught the names of characters; and this must be a very recent development. Peter: do you have an accessible source for this? How recent, Catholic missionary time? And would it be right to suppose that, before the Chinese learned of Latin letters, they had to rely on a whole-word approach to learning character pronunciation?
The Japanese case is of course quite different: a Japanese-speaking friend assures me that children do indeed use the hiragana syllabary to learn the Chinese-like kanji characters: but how do they learn the hiragana?
A quick Google for “Chinese radicals” leaves me doubtful that they are a reliable indication of pronunciation; the name of a radical doesn’t seem to have much to do with the name of the character in which it occurs. As for their being an indication of meaning, I suppose there’s something like that in English: a word ending in the “radical” -ology probably has something to do with some sort of science, but then there’s anth-ology, ap-ology … it’s not reliable.
engels 10.07.23 at 10:12 am
The US “assign your own expensive textbook -> PROFIT” grift always seemed obscene to me (one thing I remember from listening to Erik Olin Wright’s recordings of his classes was that when he assigned his own books he returned the royalties to his students).
Harry 10.07.23 at 1:37 pm
J — The consensus seems to be that the leveling system is unmotivated, unscientific, and harmful. (The books are fine, as far as I can see, and could be used in any system). Hanford does not propose an alternative curriculum, and of course generations of teachers have been mis-trained, and thousands of school districts insist on following balanced literacy, so change won’t happen overnight anyway. And I know that Hanford is keenly aware that you can’t just come up with alternatives and plug them in. When things have gone so badly wrong there’s a whole task of reform, and its hard to do.
I didn’t notice Alan White’s comment, sorry Alan! SFA has an excellent record actually, but they won’t allow schools to use it unless they have huge levels of demonstrable buy-in. That’s smart, but means that it is unusable in many circumstances.
engels 10.07.23 at 1:55 pm
Sorry, missed the mention of Wright in the earlier comment. It comes across as even more eccentric during that 15 mins (or whatever) of the podcast. But laudable nonetheless.
engels 10.07.23 at 2:14 pm
He also made his books free to download on his website iirc, which was simpler (and better, if you don’t live in Wisconsin).
Relatedly, I was in Rough Trade (hipster British record store) the other day and was pleased to see Classes nestling amidst the usual bouquet of Kendris and Solnises: analytic marxism must be cooler than I thought…)
LFC 10.07.23 at 3:42 pm
Trader Joe @18
School districts “that seem to be lagging” presumably need to be helped in some way, though, so it’s not clear that getting rid of what you describe as a perverse reward system would improve matters.
Of course the real issue in this respect is that the main funding mechanism for public schools in the U.S. is property taxes, at least afaik, which advantages public schools in more affluent areas. The Supreme Court upheld this system in a terrible decision in the early 1970s, San Antonio School Dist. v. Rodriguez.
J, not that one 10.07.23 at 6:04 pm
Harry @ 62
I can understand that the specific choices are vulnerable to criticism that they are suboptimal. “Unmotivated, unscientific, and harmful” is extremely strong, much stronger than could possibly be justified by “they’re not phonics.” The anti-phonics crowd is selling their own readers, which obviously are also graded and presumably “motivated” by the same reasons as every other set of criteria that could possibly exist.
The whole thing is fishy in itself, using parents (and in some cases, people with dyslexia who are told that phonics programs don’t have the negative effects on them as other curriculums) to promote a very specific program that the parents are told nothing about. On top of that there is as strong sense that somebody involved in the process believes that the “science” is developed enough to state once and for all exactly what everyone should do, and moreover that it’s possible to run an entire school system just by declaring what principles should be used and having teachers follow them, robot-like.
The use of anecdotal evidence (a few bad schools) is also fishy. The use of schools that use only one curriculum as ammunition against schools that combine multiple curriculums even more so. I certainly don’t like the examples used in the series but the idea that NYC’s only problem is lack of phonics suggests some eccentric reasoning.
Maxhgns: where did you get the idea that the leveling system is based on theme? That is obviously untrue. The criteria are free online. I went through the transcripts of the podcasts quickly and did not see anything about bouncing around, and don’t know what that means? That kids are allowed to read from a range of levels, so some days they’re reading easy books and some days they’re reading difficult ones? Again, the reasoning these people are using (at least in their public statements) is eccentric and often seems to amount to anecdotes that vaguely indicate things don’t appear as strict as they used to be.
maxhgns 10.07.23 at 11:40 pm
Episode 5 is the one that tackles the levels. That’s where I got the claim that the A-Z reading levels are based on pictures, context, and themes, not on the difficulty of sounding out the words in the text.
I doubt it’s obviously untrue, given the careful research that went into producing the podcast. I’ll freely admit that I’m deferring to Hanford.
engels 10.08.23 at 9:59 am
the perverse reward system that says that school districts get more government funding if they seem to be lagging
Like the perverse reward system that say patients get more medical care when they seem to be ill…
engels 10.08.23 at 12:29 pm
The reading instruction culture war passed me by but I sometimes wonder if mass literacy is going to be the next casualty of digital capitalism’s war on human dignity (maybe there’s a TikTok video about it, can someone ask Alexa?)
Harry 10.08.23 at 6:28 pm
“On top of that there is as strong sense that somebody involved in the process believes that the “science” is developed enough to state once and for all exactly what everyone should do, and moreover that it’s possible to run an entire school system just by declaring what principles should be used and having teachers follow them, robot-like.”
I actually suspect there are at least three people in the world who believe this, probably people who are very good at doing RCTs and very bad at interpreting them. But clearly Hanford doesn’t believe anything like this, indeed she, and Mark Seidenberg (the two protagonists here whom I actually know, Handford much better than Seidenberg, and neither of whom has any curriculum to sell) are very straightforward that they don’t know exactly what should replace Calkins et al. The science shows that a substantial proportion of children can’t learn to read from the Calkins et.al. methods, and that phonics needs to play a much bigger role in the teaching of those students. In general, when people resist any independent scrutiny of the wares they are selling, and continue to sell those wares long after high quality evidence of their failure is widely available, its reasonable to conclude they are untrustworthy and bad actors (Hanford is extremely restrained actually, and doesn’t accuse them of bad faith). They both see the job of figuring out what actually to do very difficult, and are approaching it with admirable intellectual honesty (Seidenberg publicly in print, Hanford in the many meetings she has with adminstrators and legislators).
Harry 10.08.23 at 6:34 pm
“the perverse reward system that says that school districts get more government funding if they seem to be lagging
Like the perverse reward system that say patients get more medical care when they seem to be ill”
The purported perverse rewards aren’t really in place any more, but there were perversities: some schools with low income but high achieving students would deliberately keep their standardized test scores low in order not to jeopardise their Title 1 status. Maybe it was worth living with this phenomenon given the realistic alternatives, in fact it probably was (eg, one alternative NOT on the table was actual officials making informed judgements about what was actually happening in schools), but the phenomenon was like a reward structure that encourages some hospitals to let a few people who were curable to die so as not to lose funding.
MJG 10.08.23 at 6:38 pm
EB@54
MJG@46 —
No one proposes all phonics and nothing but phonics.
Not discussing the value of other ways of learning to read, or worse suggesting, without any evidence, that other ways are detrimental is more or less the same as saying all phonics, nothing but phonics, maybe even worse. This is what I got from the sold a story podcast and most of the people pushing phonics these days.
The point that “science of reading” proponents make is that phonics done systematically is a foundation that cannot be skipped, for most children.
The balances reading approach group is okay with phonics but worries very much about its limitations especially as students move into a phase where meaning is more important than word recognition. My experience, completely anecdotal, is that word recognition will come, while figuring out meaning becomes more difficult as it becomes more important. I will say teaching in a university the issue I have the most trouble with in people (including professors) simply recognize a word without searching for its deeper contextual meaning. Is this a function of our society moving so strongly towards phonics?
A good phonics curriculum is not endless drills; it is not time consuming; it can be enjoyable for the children, and it leaves plenty of time for additional literacy activities.
l wonder if teachers feel the same way. Whether this is the reason that most teachers do not seem to like implementing phonics. And then the teachers get blamed for not doing the right thing. Most schools give 45 minutes a day for reading. To say there is time for other things really suggests misunderstanding of how school is set up. At the end of 45 minutes teachers must go to science, or math or social studies. I also question whether students find phonics interesting but I would have to see some research on this.
MrMr 10.08.23 at 6:54 pm
engels@68
You joke, but fee-for-service payment structures in medicine where providers get paid more to do more to patients who are sicker encourages those providers to overstate their patients’ illness in order to justify providing and then charging for needless medical interventions. This is bad not only because it wastes social resources that could go toward actually useful medical services (or education, infrastructure, or your pick of other social priorities), but also because medical interventions are often in themselves harmful and only justified by their ability to treat the more serious harms of the illnesses they target. But of course healthy people are not in danger of experiencing those more serious harms of illness, so providing them the unnecessary intervention needlessly harms them.
There has been some social experimentation with other payment models, like paying providers for their patients remaining healthy, which discourages overprescribing and encourages an ounce of prevention over a pound of cure. But there are difficulties there, too; we do not want to flip the incentives in a way that encourages providers to focus on only taking patients who are, quite independently of their efforts, healthy and likely to remain so.
Which is all to say that the comparison of education to medicine on point, but I think the lesson is not the one you’re suggesting–in both cases it is quite difficult to untangle the causal effect of the treatment/teaching from other background factors, and for that reason in both cases it is correspondingly difficult to set funding schemes that will fully align provider incentives with the prosocial outcomes we hope for.
J, not that one 10.08.23 at 7:24 pm
Harry, this story raises more questions than me for answers, and one of them is whether the new replacement curriculums are being driven so purely by neuropsychology as some of Hanford’s sources describe them to be. The whole thing is deeply frustrating and this is clearly not the place for asking those questions. The one thing I’m sure of is that whatever happens it won’t be driven by an NPR podcast.
MrMr 10.08.23 at 8:43 pm
MJG @ 72
“I will say teaching in a university the issue I have the most trouble with in people (including professors) simply recognize a word without searching for its deeper contextual meaning. Is this a function of our society moving so strongly towards phonics?”
Probably not. If early educational paradigms had such irreversible, lasting effects, then we would observe substantial heterogeneity in what populations of university students across different countries were capable of, given that different countries have different pedagogical traditions. But while there may be some culture shock involved in switching between systems, international students routinely adjust and then go on to do all the same things as domestic ones. Once you get to university, calculus is calculus regardless of whether you got new or old math in elementary school, and I can’t imagine it’s different for reading.
EB 10.08.23 at 8:43 pm
MJG@72 —
Let me give you some background. I have taught first grade and fourth grade. Elemtary-aged students spend far more than 45 minutes each day on reading and language arts. In some schools, as much as 2.5 hours. It’s not all skills (whether memorizing sight words, using cuing, or phonics). There are teacher-read stories, student-choice reading, student-written stories and accompanying illustration, students acting out stories, etc etc. I agree ethat the whole point of reading instruction is to derive meaning, not just decode words; that is why attention is given to making sure students have enough background knowledge to know what the words they are reading mean. But they can’t attach a meaning to a word if they can’t even detect what it sounds like when spoken.
You are right that some teachers don’t like teaching phonics lessons. The same teachers probably also don’t like teaching arithmetic facts or algorithms. But depending on osmosis to get children to master these skills is a cop-out. Some students can just “absorb” these kinds (particularly if they have support and/or tutoring by educated parents), but many cannot.
Siegfried Engelmann taught very low-income 5-year old African-American children to read effectively using a 30 minutes a day phonics-based program (read up on Project Follow Through for more detail). He was a difficult person and had little ability to sell his methods to the education establishment, but his programs are still in use and they still work.
It’s decoding plus knowing the meaning; both are essential. But decoding underlies the process.
michael langford 10.08.23 at 11:34 pm
Insomnia led me to this post, and I may be plagued by it for a while yet. So far, I have listened to Sold a Story three times. And, I have read all the comments here. Some of you didn’t follow Harry’s instruction … you didn’t listen at all. (You’re just too smart? Doesn’t sound that way from your comments…).
I have a personal stake in this. My niece is a teacher who struggled with Fountas and Pinnell before creating her own curriculum, which has now been adopted by her school district in south Arkansas. There’s a world out there that most of you people have never experienced, deeply stratified with impenetrable ceilings. The only way out is learning to read well. Subjecting children to teaching methods that inhibit their ability to learn (in spite of the voluminous evidence to the contrary) is academic malfeasance. That is what Apartheid states do. That is what Clay, and Calkins, and F & P have done.
I live among college professors; smart in a few things, unfathomably ignorant in others, fearful of breaching the social constraints of collegiality by speaking up for right.
Check your privilege at the door.
Omega Centauri 10.09.23 at 1:04 am
Reminds me of the brief meeting I had with my kids reading teacher in the late 90’s. I had taught my three boys at home using something called DYSTAR, a modified phonics program. About two months of 15 minutes per day and they were fluent at age 4. The school was amazed and wanted to know how I did it. I brought in the book. The look of horror on her face when she saw the book told me everything. Orthodoxy beats evidence every day.
engels 10.09.23 at 1:16 am
Ok I was being glib but calling it “the perverse reward system” sounds rather more categorical and esssnetialist than saying it entails some perverse incentives, and it was the former I was reacting to. In principle I do want struggling schools to get more resources so they can improve: economically illiterate I know…
Trader Joe 10.09.23 at 12:04 pm
@65 and @68
Perhaps I should clarify what I mean by a ‘perverse reward system’ since it seems to have been lagging.
From an administrators standpoint – if the school succeeds they can boast of their success, if it fails they can boast they secured more funding – a bureaucrats dream. The system never quite gets around to firing people who don’t ultimately deliver success despite the increase in resource. Indeed it seems to just keep showering them with more resources.
That’s what I was getting at – I’m certainly not opposed to helping laggard systems, I am oppossed to leting poor administrators continue to administrate.
J, not that one 10.09.23 at 3:27 pm
For no particular reason, @80 reminds me of the true story a mayor who was running for reelection. Her opposition said she hadn’t given the school system the resources it needed. Her response was that she’d done a great job running the school system, evidence of which was that she had managed to have it get by with less money than the city council had allocated for it.
Harry 10.09.23 at 6:14 pm
In large school districts principals get moved around quite a bit now, and actually I gather (from people who study this) that NCLB and increased accountability probably has reduced the perversities within school districts — principals who fail don’t last as long as they used to, though in my experience they are sometimes then shunted into jobs which don’t mean a lot and have quite good pay.
engels 10.09.23 at 8:51 pm
she had managed to have it get by with less money than the city council had allocated for it
The parable of the talents never gets old.
MisterMr 10.10.23 at 1:57 pm
Just chiming in to say that MrMr in this thread is not me (since a similar confusion happened before).
Rob Chametzky 10.11.23 at 2:16 pm
Two pointers in what is likely a thread that is going to end soon, if it hasn’t already.
One is to a paper that provides a framwork in which to think about the actual question/issue that Harry originally raised, about academic by-standers. It’s this
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/88584/2003_Lohmann_Darwinian_Medicine_University.pdf?sequence=1
One can do what one likes with the framework, of course, but it IS a framework, and does provide some insights, which is, after all, about what one can hope for. As far as I have been able to determine, the larger work from which this was ostensibly drawn has never appeared.
The second is, again, to Mark Seidenberg’s page
https://seidenbergreading.net/
Reading the thread, I REALLY REALLY REALLY recommend anyone with any kind of interest in the area go there and read some of the posts–a bunch of things that have come up here(in) are well-addressed there(in). The three on “the Simple View of Reading” and the one on ” ‘The Science of Reading'” (they are not long, btw) are, I think, plausible places to start.
As Harry@70 says, he’s not selling anything and is quite clear that he doesn’t have answers that we’d all like–and neither does anyone else–but that where and how to look to find material out of which to construct answers is also something he’s clear about. Full disclosure-ish stuff: While my undergraduate psycholinguistics professor was his graduate advisor, I’ve never met Seidenberg and my views in theoretical (psycho)linguistics are not his, and in this area I trust him completely.
–RC
J, not that one 10.11.23 at 4:16 pm
@83 What was really frustrating was that her background was in education. Some people just confuse means and ends, or do something with no clear goal in the hope that a goal could be attained in some unclear, unforeseen way.
When you have two school districts, one of which uses both phonics and what’s been labeled a “balanced literacy” program, and examines what’s working and what’s not, and makes changes accordingly in a boring, unglamorous way — and another district that chases after one fad after another, going all in on one curriculum and throwing away everything else, then later throwing that away and going all in on another one, and somehow never figuring out how to make any of them work for their students — it’s probably unfair to attack the first group of districts on the assumption that they’re all the same. Administrators don’t have time to find the silver lining in that kind of thing and are probably justified in shutting their ears to its source, even if they’d prefer otherwise.
engels 10.11.23 at 6:51 pm
As I said I missed the British phonics discourse but I did just turn on BBC News and heard that Labour’s new big idea for education is to teach four year olds how to budget.
engels 10.11.23 at 7:35 pm
Oh it seems they’re calling it phonics for maths.
engels 10.12.23 at 8:23 am
Not sure how this fits in: Focus on phonics to teach reading is ‘failing children’, says landmark study
Rob Chametzky 10.12.23 at 4:28 pm
In re engels@89
Not sure how this fits in:
Focus on phonics to teach reading is ‘failing children’, says landmark study
As (far too) often, Campbell’s Law can help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell's_law
Campbell’s example of “achievement tests” in education was already raised explicitly by E.F. Lindquist in 1951–and Lindquist did more to promote achievement tests in (US) education than anyone (and maybe everyone) else.
Original Campbell paper is here
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/014971897990048X?via%3Dihub
–RC
engels 10.13.23 at 5:19 pm
Thanks. But I meant how does it fit with the argument of the podcast endorsed by the post that The Science is entirely on the side of Phonics?
maxhgns 10.13.23 at 8:03 pm
engels: The podcast doesn’t claim that phonics is sufficient. But who would? That would be moronic. It, and the science it cites, merely claim that it’s necessary. Or, that’s my understanding, anyway.
There also obviously isn’t just one way to teach phonics. I don’t really understand what’s meant by ‘synthetic’ phonics or what all of the other alternatives are, so I can’t really comment further on that issue. But from what’s described in the Guardian article, it doesn’t really sound like it undermines the idea that phonics is necessary, or that the ‘balanced literacy’ approach is garbage. When you get to the paragraph that begins “critics say”, what follows is an obvious straw man (by conflating what’s necessary and what’s sufficient for reading) coupled with a red herring (we’re talking about learning to read, not loving to read!), so that doesn’t exactly lend much credence to the critical position.
But, you know. I haven’t read the underlying paper. And even if I did, it’s all pretty far outside my area of expertise.
Harry 10.14.23 at 3:54 am
Because the paper doesn’t seem to be about teaching phonics (as far as I can tell — I only read the start). It seems to be about the effects of a government policy, not a pedagogical strategy (hence the relevance of Rob’s comment).
The difference is why neither Hanford nor Seidenberg (I know Hanford well, and Seidenberg only very slightly) think its obvious what government policy should be, nor do I. (I do think it is obvious that getting rich off snake oil when you should know full well that the evidence is that the snake oil does no good and some harm is morally dodgy, but neither of them actually says even that).
KT2 10.14.23 at 4:27 am
Harry said “…getting rich off snake oil when you should know full well that the evidence is that the snake oil does no good”
Reply: Cough syrup.
As having a control group to experiment on the young learning to read, perhaps a PhD student may be supervised by some here (Harry?) to trial teaching a Language Model to read with and without phonemes. The LM then has to generate speech as well. Which may provide indisputable and snake oil breaking validity.
“Tiny Language Models Come of Age
By BEN BRUBAKER
October 5, 2023
“To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic children’s stories.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-language-models-thrive-with-gpt-4-as-a-teacher-20231005/
Just sayin…
engels 10.14.23 at 5:03 pm
I thought the study was about the effects of a government policy to mandate a pedagogical strategy (phonics) but maybe I’m confused. The comparison is with “balanced instruction,” which may or may not be what Calkins et al promoted in US. Needless to say I have no strong feelings about any of this (apart from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which is a great film) as I can’t remember how I was taught to read.
MJG 10.15.23 at 2:46 pm
I had promised myself I would stay away from the reading wars because I feel (my own feeling) it is not a good faith debate.
But it seems the campaign against anything not phonics has reached a fever pitch,
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/lucy-calkins-teachers-college.html
At least I was finally able to find the roadmap to phonic of evidence based through Columbia University’s statement about the Child Mind Institute. It seems their work is based on brain imagery of dyslexic children,
https://childmind.org/article/how-kids-learn-to-read/
Not being a brain researcher I am not sure how much of this is a just so argument, people were pushing phonics long before we had this technology. Were the phonics people just savants.
There is though an important report on the science of reading,
https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Science-of-Reading-eBook-2022.pdf
Again with no further readings at the end. If I did this in a class I think I would be strongly questioned as to my assertions.
Why do there seem to be so few readings on the actual scientific evidence in the science of reading. If anybody has any I think that would help legitimize the debate.
Ah, by the way they also mention Randomize Control Trials as the gold standard, but interestingly they don’t site any research in their report (which the New York Times uses – the report I mean – to justify that phonics is an evidence based approach). But I suppose people only understand RCTs when they agree with you.
Go to the end of the report, there is to me what is a very scary page. This it seems to me is the type of sentiment we should be wary of.
“Use this space to define how you will commit to this movement”
That is pretty messed up.
Harry 10.15.23 at 3:50 pm
“I thought the study was about the effects of a government policy to mandate a pedagogical strategy (phonics) but maybe I’m confused.”
Studying a pedagogical practice might find that it is superior to others, but if a government mandate of that practice might not find good results because government mandates don’t always lead to the widespread use of the practice (this is where Rob’s comment is relevant), and even if they do the study might catch implementation dips. X may be a better practice than Y, but a teacher used to doing Y might get worse results with X in the period in which they are learning how to do X. Which might be a very long period if there’s no investment in professional learning, as there wasn’t when Gove issued his decree.
A general matter: secretaries of state of both parties in England have proved remarkably ignorant of how change works in education, with a few exceptions. My dad’s new-ish book is full of very interesting interviews with former secretaries of state, and very few come out of it well in my opinion (I would say Baker, Morris, Shephard and Greening all come out of it well, but I can’t speak for him — and in Baker’s case it’s mainly because he has a good understanding of the mistakes he made, rather than because of what he did).
Harry 10.15.23 at 4:13 pm
“I can’t remember how I was taught to read.”
I can, probably because I was a late reader (7ish). My school classified me as educationally subnormal (charming eugenics classification), because I couldn’t read, didn’t say much, and was totally physically uncoordinated (clumsy, terrible fine motor skills, etc). My parents must have tried me with phonics before school, but when I finally learned it was through being pulled out and intensively drilled in phonics.
I was a very literatistic, and rather dull-witted kid, and balanced literacy (with all the guessing and cueing) would have completely done for me. Purely anecdotal of course.
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