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

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

by Khaine • 3 years ago

305 508 3 years ago

features.apmreports.org

lr4444lr3• 3 years ago

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

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

ljf• 3 years ago

It is a really interesting problem - my son and my daughter were both taught using phonics - my son had very little interest in reading and spelling (very much like me at his age) but reads at about the level he should (I personally think if he is anything like me, he is doing really well).

My daughter took to reading and spelling like a natural - the same processes just worked for her, and engaged with the way she thinks and acts. She's the type of kid who will write a small essay in each birthday card she writes, where-as my son (like me) will have to be coaxed to write any more than the name and his name.

But get me on a keyboard and I can write for hours - I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper. As an adult I do LOVE reading though, and can have a pretty good go at spelling, though still plenty I get wrong.

bityard• 3 years ago

Wow, this sounds like my life. I honestly don't remember how I learned to read (although I might guess that it came from a desire to learn about how the world worked).

But I can remember clearly the exact moment my daughter wanted to read for the first time. I read a book to her every night and one particular evening it dawned on her that the stories I was reading to her came from the writing on the page instead of the pictures in the book. From that moment on, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from wanting to read.

johncalvinyoung• 3 years ago

Random aside:

I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper

I don't know your details, and your experience could stem from something like dysgraphia. But I personally did not have any such difficulties and still strongly preferred keyboards to ballpoint pens, until I discovered fountain pens. Within a few weeks of practicing taking notes with a fountain pen I found my handwriting improving dramatically, with much less wrist/hand strain--rediscovered a love of handwriting. (Writing with a fountain pen _requires_ less pen pressure on the paper, and writing with liquid ink moves much more fluidly and expressively than most ballpoint pens.) Might be worth a try at some point. I still type all day for my job, but don't flinch at the idea of taking pages of notes at a conference or church service, and I enjoy writing handwritten letters once again.

wiredfool• 3 years ago

That book worked well for my 3 kids, who are all voracious readers now. Generally did it at age 5 or 6.

theGnuMe• 3 years ago

In this case the researchers know what works but the teachers aren't taught the science of reading.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why...

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap...

Khaine8• 3 years ago

Sure, its not great that they weren't taught the science behind it, but on one episode they quoted a teacher who was taught the new way, and she rejected it because 'she didn't like it'

From the transcript:

"She didn’t come away with an understanding of how children learn to read. She didn’t really learn about the science of reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the training they got during Reading First opened their eyes. Changed their lives even. Some of them still use the materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many other teachers, Reading First represented a change they didn’t like. They were told to follow a curriculum. With structured lessons like the one you heard when Bush visited the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin, it felt traditional and old-fashioned."

And from a later episode:

"Like Christine Cronin. She’s the teacher in Boston who tried to get on board with Bush’s Reading First program, but said the curriculum she was given felt old-fashioned. She remembers looking at the pictures in books by Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins and thinking – that’s what I want my classroom to be like.

Christine Cronin: They framed a picture of reading instruction that seemed beautiful. Like, softly lit rooms. Kids were gonna have cozy nooks where they were curling up with a good book. It got your heart, along with your mind."

This teacher wasn't worried about the science, she was sold on the 'look and feel'.

numeromancer3• 3 years ago

This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian".

Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a work called Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.

tdekken4• 3 years ago

Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).

makeitdouble2• 3 years ago

From the his wikipedia page [0], he seems to have spent at most 4 years actually teaching (from "early 1960s" to 1964), was a marketing guy among other things before that, and spent a long career writing eductation books and articles and seminars after that.

You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Engelmann

oxfordmale8• 3 years ago

Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen.

Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out to be.

mandmandam• 3 years ago

Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"?

In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.

camelite2• 3 years ago

https://www.pedagogynongrata.com/a-response-to

mattmcknight4• 3 years ago

No way. That is absolute bullshit. You can tell, because they cite exactly zero studies showing some other way is better. They are looking at scores over time with no control, which can be decreasing for any other reason.

Phonics based reading instruction is response to the massive scandal that already happened in the US where they tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction, three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education researchers with new books to sell don't want to accept that the boring way works better, especially for students with less support at home (where parents often use phonics to teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/school...

https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/03/13/richmond-school-find...

anon2917• 3 years ago

I am shocked this comment exists, when the counter-example is literally written into it. English uses the latin alphabet which is a phonetic alphabet. It's why english readers can also 'read' Spanish without understanding any of the words. Anyone who says otherwise should be promptly ignored.

DonaldFisk2• 3 years ago

It's been successful in Scotland: https://www.pearson.com/uk/educators/schools/making-an-impac...

This article compares Scotland with England: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-ch...

One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good" and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).

analog316• 3 years ago

Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of the era. I learned to read at home. Both of my kids, likewise.

It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?

Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.

I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.

Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers. Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.

That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.

jrochkind12• 3 years ago

On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George Orwell.

Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading).

On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.

bregma• 3 years ago

We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day.

By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored.

Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.

dennis_jeeves1• 3 years ago

It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special

As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids.

tivert5• 3 years ago

It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.

Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.

freeopinion• 3 years ago

Phonics were all the rage when I was learning to read. I'm sure it helped me in some way for a year or two. Then I spent five years unlearning phonics. For the most part, I learned by rote memorization of spelling lists and by figuring out words from context through a lot of individual reading. My children learned from rote memorization and from context. Every English-literate person I know learned this way. Every less-literate person I know did not learn this way.

I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.

As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.

phoe-krk9• 3 years ago

English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?

No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw

megmogandog• 3 years ago

Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology, but isn't English one of the least phonetic alphabets? afaik most other languages have much more consistent pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.

troupe• 3 years ago

Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise.

There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized.

I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 3 years ago

I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the latter, but neither of the former?

And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"?

Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics?

I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?

lisper• 3 years ago

English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?

Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound different.

Oh, wait...

nice2meetu4• 3 years ago

We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.

That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.

mcv3• 3 years ago

Not every kid learns it automatically, though. My oldest could read before he went to kindergarten (and skipped a grade later), my youngest needed extra help learning to talk. Most kids are somewhere in between those two extremes.

Spooky232• 3 years ago

IIRC, about 65% of children just learn to read with whatever method. The remainder need different strategies or more time or both to help.

I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October.

The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!

bradknowles• 3 years ago

My grandfather sold World Book encyclopedias. He ended up being a regional manager for Fields Enterprises, for World Book. We always had recent editions of the encyclopedia around the house.

That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education.

By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me.

I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.

andrepd• 3 years ago

Superficially, it seems similar to the method I used to learn to read. It dates from the 1890s, don't know if it had any scientifically basis.

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

Can vouch - that book is how I learned to read. I became a very strong reader afterward - so much so that when I was 7 the Black and Decker guide to Home Wiring was hours of entertainment.

bonthron2• 3 years ago

"Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" is an amazing book. I taught my daughter to read before kindergarten. It works.

patall• 3 years ago

What does "before kindergarten" mean? In the mornings? Or before she was old enough to go there? I started kindergarten at age 2 (like described in Wikipedia) and I suspect that is not what you mean.

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

The issue is that many schools are expected to teach students at scale. If parents are willing to spend more time coaching their kids instead of outsourcing it, then the problem would be less severe. Good schools generally all have a low teacher to student ratio for a reason. Bloom's 2 sigma problem is very real, spend more time one on one with your kids and even poor pedagogy can yield results.

bradleyjg3• 3 years ago

I don’t know if it’s utopian or dystopian but in 20 years we may have the majority of education being done by AIs. That’s the only practical way of getting to 1:1.

kenjackson• 3 years ago

Used that book for my son at around age 4. He never learned to love reading, but he’s a good reader.

One thing that always perplexed me is his spelling/writing. He does very little reading on his own. But he spells and writes incredibly well. He can spell words he has never seen before - I think he can apply implicit rules after seeing relatively few examples.

rahimnathwani3• 3 years ago

book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons"
Anecdote: it worked for my kid.

It worked for my kid, too. And it's worked for my friends' kids. And for at least one stranger who read a previous HN comment I wrote.

If you have a child who is 3, 4 or 5, today (or whenever Amazon delivers) is the best time to start.

woolcap• 3 years ago

An excellent book. I taught all of my kids to read with it. All are strong readers. By lesson 70 or so, most of them had caught the gist and didn't need to finish it out. Highly recommended.

mellavora• 3 years ago

You are right it is `required methodologies`, but wrong on the source.

The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach.

Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply it.

How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has to fight against this stuff all the time.

davemp2• 3 years ago

The US Gov really needs to start in-housing critical tools if only to build internal competency. There also probably needs to be more incentives for individuals inside the USG to excel and produce value. There are too many perverse incentives for unscrupulous contractors to milk tax payers (see the national parks situation [0]).

There is a huge resource imbalance with the amount of money spent generating hype/misinformation targeting USGov acquisitions vs how much is spent on the other end doing research and fostering expertise.

Maybe the way contracts are written/awarded could also just be overhauled for a similar effect.

[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...

kelseyfrog• 3 years ago

I can also personally vouch for Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It accelerated my ability to teach my kiddo to read by doing exactly what I wasn't an expert in - designing a reading pedagogy. We worked though the book in pandemic kindergarten and I can't help but attribute his current reading success to the work we did back then. It was a silver lining in a time of uncertainty and the memories I have of us working through the book together are memories I'll cherish for the rest of my life.

TedDoesntTalk• 3 years ago

I've tried this book. My son won't follow the instructions exactly. And the book makes it clear they must be followed exactly. i don't know what to do.

arthurjj• 3 years ago

+1 to "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". It's step by step and doesn't require a large amount of planning or thinking from the parent. Which means it's easy, which means you'll do it. Even when busy

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

My wife mixed reading with spelling, starting when each boy was four. She'd work on simple letter sounds, then make a list of 'rhyming' words: sat, pat, fat, cat, mat and so on. They would sound out the list, then come up with some more, even some silly ones like dat or jat. Hilarious! for a four-year-old.

So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.

sailfast• 3 years ago

FWIW We used the 100 easy lessons book for all of our kids and they read very well for their ages and enjoy reading.

jerf• 3 years ago

There is a significant portion of academia entranced by novelty, the joy of forbidden or secret knowledge, and other such things. For these people, an idea is not valuable because it is true, or useful, or well-established by experience or science. In fact these are graded as points against an idea. Boring.

Where these academics are most prominent is probably art. Opinionated opinion alert, but these are near the root of the reason why academic art has become utterly annihilated as a viable cultural source. The continual pursuit of novelty and reconstruction above all took them from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even merely interesting into fields so far disconnected from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even interesting that they are now irrelevant, despite their firm beliefs to the contrary.

Education... are pikers compared to them, honestly. But it does seem to be a consistent pattern that some education ideas are proposed and generate excitement precisely because they run contrary to experiences, the expectations of those doing it for years, precisely because they are different from established methods and curricula... and that is enough. Not because they can show better results. Not because of better outcomes. That they are different and heterodox is enough.

Unsurprisingly, when "better" is not part of the evaluation criteria, "better" is not what you get. And that's me being generous; at times "better" would also constitute a strike against the methodology... or at least, what you would consider "better".

Education is strangely bimodal. On the one hand you get savaged at the slightest suggestion that the curriculum is not perfect as is, and we have amazing stasis on what can be taught in most subjects, frozen around a hundred years ago. On the other hand you get crazies who think the solution to math is to start kindergartners out on college-level number theory (the original "New Math") or who want to redo education on the hippie drum circle model and teach math based on how it makes you feel (not thinking of anything in particular here, just a cynical pastiche of what I see out there lately). The one thing you can not do is incrementally improve the existing systems.

In the latter case it astonishes me how these people can zoom straight up to the Federal level sometimes, powered by the sheer academic excitement at a new theory, before anyone can hardly even formulate the thought of maybe running some tests on the new theory before pushing it out to millions of kids, and how this has happened over and over to greater and lesser degrees over the past 60-70 years.

rovolo• 3 years ago

1) Do you mean "Academic Art" the style, or "Academic" art as a type of person producing the art? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art

2) What's an example piece which you think has helped "annihilate" academic art?

jkubicek• 3 years ago

We also used "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" for both of our kids. It works outrageously well and we've recommended it to all our friends with young children.

skywhopper• 3 years ago

For what it’s worth, the phonics book you mentioned was worse than useless for my child. After hearing from friends whose son was reading at four about how great this book was, we tried it out for months. It didn’t go well and eventually we gave up. Our daughter took things at her own pace and only really learned to read in second grade. Now she’s a voracious reader, writer, and straight-A computer science student in her junior year of college.

The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.

whoomp12342• 3 years ago

until you have felt the wrath of shipping a production stopping bug, you know nothing john snow.

ugh123• 3 years ago

"Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons"

Thats a great book and one i've used with my kids. My only issue with it is the pages are so 'busy' and jammed with content that it's hard for kids to focus, even with parent's guidance pointing at the word segments.

sn92• 3 years ago

Fans of "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" might wish to check out "Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach" [0]. It uses a similar phonics approach but uses basic pattern matching to teach kids in a much simpler format. Be sure to check out the reviews for the original and newer edition.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814311156?psc=1

gnicholas4• 3 years ago

Whoa, this book appears to be $50-$500?

kthejoker2• 3 years ago

Just wanted to +1 Teach Your achild ... taught all my 4 kids over the summer after they turned 4 with minimal fuss.

Definitely a top 10 all time purchase.

kleiba• 3 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

Vanderson5• 3 years ago

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

bluGill5• 3 years ago

I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to make sawdust or music, not do more research.

bradleyjg3• 3 years ago

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

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

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

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

Retric2• 3 years ago

There are mountains of education research out there. Some collages actually do focus on it, but the real goal is to prepare people for the workplace by jumping though whatever hoops are mandatory.

Research is largely ignored because what actually determines what’s used is politics not some rigorous validation of what works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not because it’s particularly useful, but because it’s been privatized and the only way for those companies to make even more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to convince people more testing was needed, which worked.

Luckily it’s shocking easy to educate most people, almost like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff…

dwater• 3 years ago

In my education degree program, in the intro class we spent time every week discussing recent research papers we had read. I was interested in practicing, not doing research, but when selecting schools there were clearly some that had a research focus and some that had a practical focus.

humean_being4• 3 years ago

This was something that I and a friend found surprising when he was studying to become a primary school teacher in the UK. A lot of the education for teachers in the UK is effectively 18th century philosophy taught uncritically - the likes of Rousseau, etc...

We both have a university background in philosophy (we both did the US equivalent of "majoring" in it, and I went to graduate level) and what we found disturbing was how uncritical and non-evidence based the teaching of teachers was. It seems like a fair bit of non-practical teaching of teaching, at least in the UK, is ideological indoctrination. They aren't "doing philosophy" in the sense that you would in a philosophy course where you are meant to be critical in your engagement, but are being told to accept philosophical arguments as doctrine.

So in a way its not surprising to me that teachers fall for other doctrinal ways of teaching.

You go to linguistics departments and they actually do stuff around evidence based child language acquisition, meanwhile teaching colleges ignore that and teach an unreflective centuries old ideology about how children learn.

There appears to be a big cultural gap between say linguistics departments and education departments.

allknowingfrog3• 3 years ago

This was exactly my experience. I had to pass a review board before I began my senior year, and it was essentially an "ideological indoctrination" examination. I said what they wanted to hear. What else was I going to go with the 3 years of education that I had already purchased? I was fortunate to study at a college that emphasized field-based experience, because it was the only degree-related value that I left with.

In the end, I spent more hours earning my degree than using it. I work in software now.

mschuster912• 3 years ago

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

There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons:

- teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit. Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an effective social worker for students in need, fundraising, classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely.

- there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge - some of them actively discourage new teachers from trying out what they learned in university because "we always did it this way".

- closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons. Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time", "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list is endless.

- frankly said, no one cares about education. Big Labor doesn't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms, restaurants and other menial work who don't object to exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged children where the parents take care for good private schools to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent people.

- there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own.

- a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty has exploded...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...

kyrra2• 3 years ago

there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge

I'd also say part of the cause of this are the teacher unions. When we don't do merit based promotions and raises, people don't care as much.

tgv5• 3 years ago

Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences bungle somewhere below even social psychology. There's no reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and ministeries, and mandate methods and topics.

We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.

AbrahamParangi• 3 years ago

One of the downsides of credentialism seems to me that in squishier fields you can end up creating false-credentials where none should exist.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 years ago

Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics, media, and even in game design.

If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.

nmca2• 3 years ago

Just to steelman for a second but educational research is obviously quite hard (long horizons, large costs including opportunity costs, vulnerable groups necessitating careful ethical standards and consideration).

I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given equal investment.

thegrimmest• 3 years ago

There's lots of very good research on learning going back decades. For instance the work of Paul Pimsleur.

nicolas_t• 3 years ago

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

My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that education was way too politicised, any new minister of education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad.

This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language phenomenon known as "méthode globale" didn't last very long in France), the debate on constructivism, etc...

michaelt• 3 years ago

I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories.

My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read.

Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics

Mezzie2• 3 years ago

For teachers to be able to correct, there needs to be some level of social trust - parents need to trust that when a teacher corrects their child, they're doing it out of a desire to act in the child's best long-term interest: In loco parentis. The teachers also need to be backed up by their administration and even the law.

That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right, Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is for 15 minutes.")

tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!)

darkerside4• 3 years ago

I wish you would abstain from some of the rhetoric and let your good points shine through

HopenHeyHi• 3 years ago

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

You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the rooftops about this for generations.

For example from another story posted here today:

  Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.

Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all?

Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.

There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.

Khaine8• 3 years ago

Did you listen to the episode where the teacher said, the theory might be true (phonics) but I ain't teaching it because fuck bush?

This is the problem.

JohnClark1337• 3 years ago

A common trait in the US political system. "If the person on the other side of the aisle disagrees with me on points A, B, and C, but agrees with me on point D then I need to reevaluate my position on point D." I noticed this when the pandemic began. For about a week when we first went into lockdown my very conservative and very liberal friends were all worried about getting the virus and what the effects might be. But I knew even before it happened that this mentality wouldn't last and that eventually people would look around and go "wait, we're on the same side as THOSE people? Something isn't right!"

pitaj6• 3 years ago

Just to comment on the specific issue at hand:

The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.

And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.

That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.

gumby3• 3 years ago

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

neogodless• 3 years ago

I think a lot of what they're going for is in this article:

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

droopyEyelids2• 3 years ago

Let that be a warning to anyone who gets excited about this podcast! Wow it stinks. It's like the creators were trying to replicate a Dragonball series of cliffhangers without any substance.

In that way it is good. A tremendous demonstration of how the tiniest bit of information (Many kids benefit from phonics) can be stretched into hours and hours and hours of content through some emotional manipulation.

gumby3• 3 years ago

A good application for a Transformer system like GPT to listen to the podcasts and generate the single sentence inside.

denton-scratch5• 3 years ago

Yeah, I just read the "transcripts". I guess I missed a lot, because I suspect they're not transcripts, but single-sentence summaries.

I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing, because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write it; so they're trading their time for my time. That's why I say it's rude.

To be honest, the reason I'm reading the comments is in the hope of finding a proper summary.

droopyEyelids2• 3 years ago

It's not an exaggeration to say that most episodes of the podcast could be summarized with a single sentence.

The proper summary is simply that "Phonics is a vital tool to teach many kids to read."

gumby3• 3 years ago

Exactly me. Podcasts in particular are terrible because they are rarely edited at all.

If you listen to someone like Terry Gross there's an enormous amount of editing involved to make it sound like a natural conversation. Podcast world is the opposite.

Vanderson5• 3 years ago

Here's a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school age kids that were considered "unteachable" (I can't recall the exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in) I think they are about 4th or 5th grade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA

Many people didn't like the strict requirement of his reading methods, from what I have been told.

tdekken4• 3 years ago

Hi Vanderson, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).

Vanderson5• 3 years ago

I have a friend who I met in college who got his PhD working under Zig, which is how people who knew Engelmann called him. And this friend gave me a copy of his book "How to teach your child to read in 100 lessons" and I used it to teach my own kids.

I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)

What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?

phkahler• 3 years ago

For learning to read English at age 3 or 4, I often recommend a video called "The Letter Factory" and its first sequel "The Word Factory". Not a fan of the 3rd one, but these 2 are amusing cartoons that my kid liked a lot, and now really enjoys reading. Just one data point, take it or leave it ;-)

isaacfrond2• 3 years ago

Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong?

(I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)

boomboomsubban• 3 years ago

There was a NYT article about this podcast posted yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589013

mikeryan2• 3 years ago

There was some bad science that pushed teachers (really administrators) away from teaching phonics as part of the reading curriculum.

I have a daughter in third grade who struggled a little with reading (horrible timing too COVID hit at the end of kindergarten so she lost about a third of that year)

She fortunately goes to an independent school who, as a result of some of this reporting quickly turned back on “phonics” teaching for reading but I’m not sure the rest of the schools have pivoted as quickly.

fullstop2• 3 years ago

I'm wondering if I'm in the minority, but both of my kids learned to read before they started attending school.

My youngest was old enough to grow up with Netflix and we always keep the subtitles on, so she learned a ton from that. What she didn't always learn, though, was pronunciation. Some of the shows had no dialogue, but had captions for things which happened. Occasionally she will slip up even today (at ~15) and say something like co-croches instead of cockroaches. (Oggy and the Cockroaches)

It's not important, of course, the kids will get there eventually. A child wanting to read because it is fun is far more beneficial than forcing them to read. I love the "click" which happens when then they start devouring books endlessly, and when they transition from learning to read to reading to learn.

Muromec2• 3 years ago

English doesn't have consistent rule-based writing spelling, so kids have to essentially memorize all word spellings. Since some kids suck at this game, there have to be compensation strategy to fill in the blanks. At some point it went too far and the last resort compensation strategy became the main method children are taugh (tough? tof? damn this language, it makes no sense) to read.

OkayPhysicist2• 3 years ago

To be fair, English is much more consistent in the letters->sounds direction than it is in the sounds->letters direction. While being able to say a word in English hardly indicates a spelling due to there being several ways to represent the same sound, the opposite direction works pretty well, since there isn't a ton of ambiguity about what sound a given letter/digraph makes. The "exceptions" to that rule tend to be cases where we weaken (shorten/shwa/skip) unstressed vowels.

noirscape2• 3 years ago

What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It's often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they do this same "whole language" method instead of teaching people the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how to read a foreign language using their skills to put words together, and instead they fall back to the same "guessing game". Especially when you get to languages with different alphabets, this jump can be very sudden and harsh to overcome.

When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from teaching people "this is an alphabet" to "this is how to use words and sentences in that language". That might make sense if you're using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to struggle that much with the German ß once you tell them it's just pronounced like "ss" when you transliterate it), but when you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced differ significantly from your primary languages that barrier can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for grammatical rules, especially if they're different compared to yours.

I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on, and that's an alphabet with not even that many extra/fewer characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.

nradov• 3 years ago

I think your experience is atypical. Most students who learn a new language with a fairly "reasonable" alphabet like Korean or Russian find that to be the easiest part and remember most of the letters within a few days. I don't speak Greek but I've been there a few times and learned the alphabet just so that I could sort of read signs (forgot it now).

As for Duolingo, is there any independent evidence that it's actually effective? Some of my friends have been using it consistently for a long time and yet don't seem to have learned much. The gamification features are effective at driving user engagement but I'm skeptical whether it's actually a good educational tool.

noirscape2• 3 years ago

For clarity, the Ancient Greek alphabet was thought to me using a cue based method exclusively because well, it's ancient Greek, nobody talks ancient Greek anymore, it's considered a dead language (it's still very close to regular Greek in terms of alphabet though... but that wasn't a part of the education method - I will say that it helped out a lot when visiting Greece to be able to read the signs since the alphabet was still virtually identical with I think like, one extra character added over the centuries?).

The teacher did all the things you expect from a cue system - teach the students the mnemonics, instruct them how the characters are all named (because ancient Greek has a name for every character) and detail how they all looked, but there was never any conversation on how the language was actually spoken. You just had to kinda figure out what the words meant. Small aside, but we did get a phonetics lesson for Latin, to explain how the name of the Romans most famous field general, Ceasar, would eventually have his name used for the leaders of the Roman state. That word would then turn into the German word Kaiser, a word that would be used to describe a certain group of state leaders, specifically emperors (even in different languages with words like Czar being derivatives of it, with a similar pronunciation). It helped a lot to understand Latin by seeing how the pronunciation gradually evolved, even though it wasn't spoken anymore.

The only reason I actually ended up learning it was because my grade was failing and due to an administrative error, I could do a resit on an alphabet test I completely failed earlier in the year. So to prepare for that test, I decided to ignore pretty much every single mnemonic/letter name that the teacher had taught me and I just did... a straight mapping. I mapped every character in Greek to a letter similar in my native language. I had a couple of doubles but it did work. I put it together with a small word list that used most of the letters and just learned how to pronounce those words. Suddenly the alphabet clicked and that was in less than a week, after a year of failed cue-based teaching.

As for Duolingo - as far as I have tried (with Japanese), it's overly reliant on the flashcard method of learning languages. It felt very ineffective; you don't really engage with characters or words, you just learn how to fill out auto-generated sentences and how to pick the right translation from a set of 3. I don't think the issue is gamification, but rather the framework thats being used here. (Probably in part because this particular framework is easy to put into programming while "figure out the right phonetics and put those together to figure out words" is very difficult to gamify, since you're going to need to do correction based on similarity, which is very different from person to person.) I might try learning Japanese again - it's still a personal goal of mine - but Duolingo did not help much there.

Muromec2• 3 years ago

For all that is wrong with Duolingo (don't use duolingo as the only tool to learn a language), it does teach writing systems and how to pronounce individual words before throwing you into grammar.

CalRobert2• 3 years ago

Honestly having done a good bit of Duolingo and Babbel and then visiting the country I was trying to study for (Netherlands) I think they're mostly fun games that make you feel like you're learning something.

https://www.mezzoguild.com/babbel-vs-duolingo/ is a decent review that seems similar to my own experience.

So far drilling on Anki has been a bit better. Still not sure what else will work aside from moving there.

lalaland1125• 3 years ago

What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages.

The phonics debate is a lot less relevant for secondary languages.

The goal of phonics is to teach a person how to write a language that they already speak. The goal of second language instruction is generally to teach someone how to write and speak a language that they don't know in any way.

Very different education goals.

gavinmckenzie2• 3 years ago

My daughter went through a Montessori education from 18 months old through grade 8. As part of her Montessori experience, starting at age three, she began to learn to write. They trace "sandpaper" letters with their fingers; moving their fingers along the strokes of letters pre-printed on cardboard in a rough texture. From there they learn to write the letters and words, speaking the words aloud. Thus the focus is on learning to write before reading, with an implication that this process will help with word recognition.

I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori things) surprising.

vehemenz5• 3 years ago

I never gave it much thought, but I am currently teaching my 3-year-old to write letters first because I think the recognition and muscle memory with the letters would help with stringing the letters together later.

It might be pedagogically novel, but I'm confident lots of people learn this way, at least for alphabet-based languages.

sdwr2• 3 years ago

Probably not really about word recognition, but about being an agent in the world. Reading is fundamentally a passive experience. The best reader in the world may as well be Stephen Hawking.

From my understanding, Montessori is more about doing + engagement than passive learning, and the emphasis on writing would be a way to express those values.

bcrosby952• 3 years ago

I know it's not your point, but learning to write by tracing at age 3 doesn't sound anything like the actual teachings of Maria Montessori. The whole point is child directed learning, and having kids at 3 trace things sounds pretty anti-ethical towards that.

Most of this stuff is parent directed because they want little Johnny to be brilliant, but afaik goes against pretty much all early childhood development research.

taeric7• 3 years ago

Give charity to the idea. Odds are high they had a ton of tracing stations available, and the kids that gravitated to it, used it. That is, the idea is to enable learning by availability of opportunities and encouragement.

So, no. This doesn't go against any research. Unless you frame it in the most uncharitable way that you can.

legacynl2• 3 years ago

I don't think it has much to do with learning reading or writing first, but more about learning letters before you progress to words, before you progress to sentences, etc.

I don't think it really matters if you start with writing or reading first, because it's basically the same skill: knowing letter shapes and knowing which sound corresponds. It's that learning really benefits from receiving the same information in different contexts. So as long as you both teach them to write and read, the order doesn't really matter.

One reason for using the cardboard letters for younger children is that the brain regions handling bodily movement are much more advanced, and thus provide more context which (as stated earlier) helps in memorization.

But I suspect the main reason for using the sandpaper letters is because it is way more interesting for the children to have something with tactile feedback, instead of just looking at a flat card.

soneca• 3 years ago

Can someone please summarize what is this wrong methodology about?

jononomo3• 3 years ago

It became fashionable in early childhood education circles to teach children to read by looking at the accompanying pictures in the book instead of by deciphering the letters and sounding out the word.

This led to many parents thinking that their kids must have dyslexia because they weren't learning to read.

You should listen to the podcast -- it is fascinating. I listened to the entire series three times because I couldn't get over it. It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read.

HeckFeck2• 3 years ago

It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read.

Indeed. We can debate the merits of letters vs ideograms as much as we like, but English is not Chinese. Reading an alphabet is a phonetic exercise, even with all the exceptions in spoken English.

And yes, the 'dyslexia epidemic' is harrowing. Sure video-everywhere is part to blame, but how many readers and writers are we down due to children being given a label that says 'you will never spell' early in life. Even if well-intentioned the label is detrimental to your relationship with words.

Khaine8• 3 years ago

Basically, some kiwi (Marie Clay) looked into how good kids learn to read, but somehow identified all the things bad learners do. Turned this into an approach to help kids, had some apparent success in New Zealand. Basically it got kids to guess what words were based on the context of the statement, the initial letter, pictures accompanying the statement etc, rather than sounding out the word. It got imported to the states as the word of god, while at the same time science identified how kids actually learn. George Bush introduced No Child Left Behind which required science based teaching of literacy. Those who were profiting off Marie Clay's work pushed back because they wouldn't be funded, resulting in the current mess we have today.

denton-scratch5• 3 years ago

Ah, thanks for that! It doesn't come across in the written section summaries.

jononomo3• 3 years ago

Just wait until you get to the part in the podcast where the teacher intentionally covers up a word with a post-it note and then asks the kids to read it. Apparently, they are supposed to figure out the word from the context.

bell-cot2• 3 years ago

Well over a century ago now, my grandmother taught grades 1 through 8 in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Barring a substitute teacher when grandma was sick, she was the only teacher those kids ever saw until they went to the (fairly distant) high school for grade 9. Grandma was a good teacher, and every year the valedictorian at that HS was one of grandma's students. The only "central administration" that she had to care about was the little school district's Superintendent. He had no time, staff, nor budget for messing with things that worked. Nor possible upsides if he got any "new ideas" about education.

Grandma's own education was high school, plus maybe a two-year teaching certificate from a Podunk little Normal School ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/normal-school ). Her three rules for teaching 8 grades in a 1-room school house were: (1) Make sure the 1st graders all learn to read, (2) Make sure the 8th graders learn everything they'll need for high school, and (3) Make sure there's plenty of older-kids-teach-younger-ones going on in between, because you've only got time to hit the high points for grades 2 to 7.

But a whole lot changed over the decades, as American "Teacher Education" grew from a bare-minimum service sector into a huge, self-serving established empire. Especially after WWII, an incredible amount of money flowed into colleges & universities. Old stuff that worked couldn't possibly get you ahead in that empire. "Johnny can read" results take a decade to play out in the real world. Vs. cool-sounding new ideas, especially if you could stick a "Science" label on 'em (the status of "science" was incredibly boosted by WWII) and were skilled at spreading FUD and FOMO, could rocket you to success in the ever-growing academic / administrator / consultant / author / etc. Education Establishment.

wyldfire• 3 years ago

This was aired on my local NPR station a couple of months ago. It's pretty interesting stuff.

theodorewiles• 3 years ago

Can anyone suggest better materials / guides for early literacy development?

tristor• 3 years ago

I was very lucky and my mother was a teacher at a private school when I was young, so I got to attend for free. I had phonics-based reading instruction, and learned to read acceptably in first grade. By fourth grade I was one of the best readers in the school, and ended up in a gifted program.

I still remember and feel appreciation for my first grade teacher, Mrs. Drown, for teaching me to read. It opened an entire world for me.

The public schools where I lived did not use phonics, and when I entered the gifted program I shifted to public school. I met people in high school who were considered average students that had less literacy than I did in fourth grade. The overall literacy rate in our small city was lower than the national average as well.

darkerside4• 3 years ago

I learned to read so young that I don't remember learning to read. That must have been such a feeling of awakening.

jimmar• 3 years ago

I'm by no means a perfect dad, but one thing I've done well is reading to my kinds. In the past 14 years, I've read to my kids almost every night. They both tested in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension and vocabulary. I'd often be shocked when I'd read a complicated word and ask my 5th grade what it meant and she'd give me a great definition.

Read to your kids.

camgunz18• 3 years ago

All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are:

- if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds

- Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts

I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The Hollyhock Foundation and others. I'm not saying this model is bad or impugning anyone's motives here; on the contrary I would say people are acting more or less in good faith. I'm just saying there are definitely agendas here.

For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading (SOR), have a look here [0].

[0] https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

istjohn2• 3 years ago

Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.

numeromancer3• 3 years ago

Homines libenter id quod volunt, credunt.

yamtaddle3• 3 years ago

AFAIK (I know lots of teachers) "whoops, phonics was actually right all along" was back to being the state-of-the-art like 15+ years ago, among the academic-side of teacher education. Whole language only hung around because it had a lot of True Believers already in the classroom, and some districts were (and still are) slow to correct, but it was pretty clear years and years ago that it was harmful.

This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.

camgunz18• 3 years ago

Yeah. I mean I agree that Heinemann is milking books they've already put resources into publishing and they should quit. And I'm sure there's a bunch of teachers who aren't good at teaching or being humans and not teaching very well. But the core conceit of Sold a Story is there's currently a huge problem with reading pedagogy everywhere, and that's at least currently false, and maybe was never true.

yowzadave• 3 years ago

We taught our daughter to read at age 3 using the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I remember when we first brought her to kindergarten and mentioned that she was already a competent reader--her teacher seemed oddly insistent about downplaying her abilities, and kept correcting us to say that she was "decoding" the text, rather than reading it.

OK, if you say so--she's sitting in her room for hours a day silently "decoding" her books.

Anyhow, our anecdotal evidence of 1 suggests that this method works and was the foundation of a (so-far) lifetime love of reading!

camgunz18• 3 years ago

Most of the time I defend teachers, but I confess to feeling pretty weird about it because with some (super notable) exceptions I had pretty bad experiences with them. I have a lot of opinions about schools/teachers/education whatever but they're pretty polemic and would derail.

But, very glad you found success with your daughter. My partner and I just had a kid and what I wouldn't give for her to sit through us reading a very short book to her without yelling very loudly. One day haha :)

uptownfunk• 3 years ago

We're going through it now, the same book 100 lessons. I have two kids, one is almost 6 and one is 3.5. We got the book because the 6 year old was struggling considerably with reading. The book is a real effort to go through and requires a lot of patience with the 6 year old. Thankfully we are 80% of the way through it. The incredible thing is the 3.5 year old sees the older one do it and she wants to do it and she's actually on track to read much earlier than the 6 year old. It's really something to watch. I'm glad we found this book (actually on another HN thread..)

My wife, who is actually an early childhood montessori educator, was vehemently against the book, and I had to tell her, "look whatever we're doing right now isn't working, we need to do something different". Educational methodology is almost something like a religion hence such a strong need for what should be more "experienced-based" teaching. Do what works, tested on children, versus proving of academic scientific hypotheses. Sometimes what works just works and should be continued until something better can be identified. Again, a lot of this is anecdotal, but it was definitely an uphill battle. Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not be able to read.

gnicholas4• 3 years ago

We use the same book with our kids, and had a similar experience with educators. When she moved a to new school in first grade, they were extremely skeptical that she has able to read chapter books.

But I don't think it was specific to reading — they pulled the same crap when it came to other subjects. My sense is they don't want to admit when a student comes in with lots of skills because then they can't take credit for how well the student is doing at the end of the year. This is shown on report cards, where they never put down at/above grade level in the fall/winter quarters, even when the child is clearly multiple grade levels ahead. If they admitted that up front, they wouldn't be able to show "growth".

rahimnathwani3• 3 years ago

if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds

Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.

anon2917• 3 years ago

I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding out? I clearly remember myself learning to read, sounding out words and then being like 'oh that word is X'. And I see the same wheels turning with my daughter.

spaceprison• 3 years ago

Of course 'phonics only' wouldn't work, but this 'guess your way to reading' type of instruction was used with two of my three kids and I can tell you it was a joke.

It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to a private school that taught phonics as a core function of their reading curriculum did they start to actually read.

I haven't listened to the podcast so I can't speak to it's content but I'm interested to hear if what their talking about matches my experience.

camgunz18• 3 years ago

Yeah I mean, other commenters have noted that it takes a while for curricula to change, but yeah I bet that's what was going on and that sounds like bad instruction.

ch4s35• 3 years ago

Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step. The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all, and we regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.

If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.

dymk2• 3 years ago

You've gotta wonder how a nation's schooling standards shift to something like "Whole language" without, say, at least testing the methodologies to see if it results in better or worse outcomes. Seems like no actual validation was done.

camgunz18• 3 years ago

Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step

Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what any of it is.

The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all

This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole language works OK.

regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.

We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and it's not been going great [0], for instance.

If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.

Let's be a little more civil than this.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

4bpp2• 3 years ago

I would be a bit cautious about taking teachers' word for what works and what doesn't work. Every critical piece on reading instruction on the US seems to make it pretty clear that teachers have a strong emotional and political attachment to the "whole language" method that might cloud their judgement and motivate their reasoning. See for instance the opening quote of an older article in Time (https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers...):

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw [a phonics-based curriculum] out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

pfedak3• 3 years ago

That definitely comes through in the piece the parent linked, it's very much a narrative of fighting against misinformed outsiders pushing phonics for various research-based reasons, instead of just trusting teachers.

leoc• 3 years ago

There are plenty of academics who oppose or have reservations about the capital-letters Science of Reading https://radicalscholarship.com/2022/05/23/nyt-blasts-calkins... . Of course they, too, could be ideologically motivated or stubbornly attached to their existing beliefs, for all I know, but it's clearly not a clean split between academics and teachers.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

For a long time I've held the unpopular opinion that most elementary teachers are utterly incompetent, and that as an academic field, Education is becoming more and more bullshit. I will be down-voted to hell because of this, and yet, the reality always seems to agree with my world-view.

warner255• 3 years ago

I like my kids' elementary school teachers, they seem fine, and maybe it's mostly about teaching kids to behave in another social setting at that age - but I do have it in the back of my mind that zero of the best and brightest from my graduating high school class (judged by who was in the honors / AP classes) went into teaching elementary school.

camgunz18• 3 years ago

I don't mean to come off as a grumpy Xennial, but the more I interact with people in professional roles (attorneys, doctors, nurses, teachers, managers) the more I'm convince the majority of people are just incompetent. Sometimes I try and reframe this into "you have unreasonably high expectations maybe because of some personality/upbringing weirdness", but, ongoing battle haha.

pfedak3• 3 years ago

I'd dispute your characterization of the NEPC summary as well-reasoned. It's definitely a different perspective, but it's clear in a preference for valuing the experience and beliefs of "literacy scholars" over any sort of evidence that could contradict them. It does seems like a good view of the education institution's side of this argument.

It is careful to point out even minority criticism of phonics-centered instruction, while suggesting that disagreement with cueing approaches is a result of misunderstanding. It explicitly devalues "narrow" "experimental and quasi-experimental research" in favor of "decades of classroom-based and other forms of qualitative research" (how long has the experimental research been going on?). Even the naming feels slanted: the cueing approach gets called "whole language" or "balanced literacy" while opposing views start with "simple view of literacy". The "structured literacy" section ends with "although literacy researchers caution there is still much to learn about the brain and learning to read", while the cueing summary is free of similar caveats and emphasizes that it can adapt to individual students, as if other methods couldn't.

Ultimately it makes no actionable recommendations for what should actually be taught, except that no particular method should be mandated or banned, and that education should be "student-centered" (curious about the alternative...).

camgunz18• 3 years ago

I mean, I guess a good of framing this is yeah, it is "the education institution's side of this argument". I see it as informed by decades of shifting research on how to teach reading and attentive to the tension between "we need regulations to guard against bad teachers" and "we need to give teachers the freedom to apply their expertise". Most of the rest of your argument is just not realizing that those are the actual names of things (e.g. there's actually a thing called "the simple view of literacy").

And to zoom out a little, a big part of educational quality is "do good people want to teach". A heavily prescribed curriculum is one more barrier to retaining good, motivated teachers. I'm not saying phonics shouldn't be taught, and I'm not saying teachers should have the freedom to not teach it. I am saying that all the teachers I know have kids where phonics didn't work (either the kid wasn't getting it, or the kid already knew it and drilling it into them killed their passion for reading, but hey standardized testing), and that's the kind of thing that makes good people quit: you know something is counterproductive, but your boss/the man makes you do it anyway, and in this case you fail a kid.

The problem is complex, which is why my 2nd bullet point was "Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts". Another way of saying this is "school isn't a restaurant where you pull up and order an education from an unskilled worker". I get that it's high stakes and people have super bad experiences with educators (I have, for sure), but we need to appreciate the nuance here.

gnicholas4• 3 years ago

Sold a Story isn't alone; John McWhorter (a Columbia professor of linguistics) has a very similar take on phonics and has written about it in The Atlantic and the NYT.

As for bias, I understand SOS was funded by some foundation, though it's not clear what ideological bent the Hollyhock Foundation might have that would taint the reporting. I'm pretty sure Professor McWhorter is shooting straight here — he tends to speak his mind, regardless of how many friends it makes or (mostly, these days) loses him.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel...

stuaxo• 3 years ago

I guess you guys in the US could try curriculums from other English speaking countries ?

josho3• 3 years ago

American exceptionalism leaves some Americans with the mis-guided belief that there is nothing to learn from other countries. I couldn't help but laugh seeing your comment was downvoted at the time I read this.

What Americans should consider is removing charter/private schools so that rich kids have to have the same experience as middle class and lower income. In my experience wealthy families have time and resources to influence school boards to improve, so get those people improving school for everyone, not just an already elite cohort.

Second, change how schools are funded. Funding should not depend on the wealth of the surrounding neighborhoods (ie. stop funding schools through property taxes). The current model sets up poor families to have worse outcomes as they get less resources, so from the get go we take disadvantaged kids and further disadvantage them.

Unfortunately, Americans love their personal freedoms and as a result none of these options will be implemented.

rsynnott• 3 years ago

Though, in this case, the problematic technique seems to have been imported from New Zealand.

zackmorris2• 3 years ago

Ya the main problem with US education is lack of funding due to segregation. This should be the headline, not microanalysis of one specific symptom like reading comprehension.

I'm growing more concerned with each passing year that we're so distracted playing whack-a-mole with each of the thousand crises facing us that we've become blind to systems-level thinking.

When I was growing up in the 80s, we were taught that we lived in a meritocracy where anyone could be president someday, for example. Today I see that everyone has equal dignity, meaning that the sum of each individual's talents is the same. But some talents are rewarded more than others. Mainly the ability to generate profit, which has roots in othering, prejudice, maintaining the status quo, tax evasion, lobbying, corruption, but especially cheating.

That's what wokeism is about. Once one sees that it's not about individual talent, but the rigging of the system to prevent any disruption of the power of the status quo, it's impossible to unsee. So a phrase like "tax the rich" (to put an end to generational wealth inequality and heal the division) means to pull the plug on that power structure. But people misinterpret it through their own trauma, get triggered, and project against it as a perceived threat, because even the smallest benefit like one's gender or the color of their skin is conflated with their earning potential, because the system truly rewards injustice.

jononomo3• 3 years ago

This ridiculously stupid approach to teaching kids to read was imported to the US from New Zealand.

humean_being4• 3 years ago

This is horrifying. If I understood this correctly, they are being taught effectively *next token prediction* instead of reading.

The only children that will learn to read will probably be in spite of this system.

Der_Einzige• 3 years ago

Well, I was taught using phonics, and then I wrote a paper that basically applied the idea to LLMs for constrained text generation. I'd say mission accomplished.

humean_being4• 3 years ago

This is a chance, stay with me here, that humans and LLMs learn differently.

JBiserkov• 3 years ago

My "favorite" part was '"read" this word I have covered with a sticky note'.

You need X-ray vision like Superman to actually read that.

Scratch that, it was recorded video, so even Superman couldn't do that, you'd need a time machine in addition to the X-ray vision.

somishere• 3 years ago

IMHO reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom. Kids need to be interested in reading, and that's up to the parents more than it is to the school.

My very unique / personal take. Have been doing sight words with my 5yo for the last two weeks. He just started his second term of prep (pre year 1). He's not advanced as far as I can't tell, but I'll tell you it's exhilarating to watch his progress. He absolutely loves the challenge of it. And he's already sounding out and reading short, repetitive books based on known words. He's a lucky kid for so many reasons. Not a great case in point for the same.

All kids are different, with unique needs, and schools should be expected to adapt to these. But it's a two way street. If an individual isn't reading by fourth grade, after four years of schooling, then something is going on .. either at home or in a cognitive sense. If a whole class isn't reading, then sure - look at the curriculum ... but there's probably something more systemic at play.

jasonhansel• 3 years ago

that's up to the parents more than it is to the school.

The reality is that some parents simply do not have the time and resources to provide this sort of support. The purpose of our educational system is to educate kids, not to supervise them while their parents do so.

ThrowawayTestr• 3 years ago

Why have parents be involved with raising their kids at all? Just let the state do everything.

josho3• 3 years ago

reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom.

You are correct. Those students that read with their parents and learn at home have a significant advantage.

Our education system however should do everything that it can to help those children that didn't have this advantage to catch up. I've read research in the past that shows good schools to bring those kids up to the same level, evidently reading the comments here it seems the US school system has significant issues.

tempaway45752• 3 years ago

I think if you did a study of Agile vs Waterfall and then took out all the nuance and then wrote an angry podcast about one side or the other it would be somewhat equivalent to this. i.e. reducing complex things (like project managment or teaching) to 'this way is wrong other way is right'. The skills/experience of the teachers/project managers are probably the biggest factor

Ajedi322• 3 years ago

I just listened to this podcast a few weeks ago. What really struck me was just how obviously wrong the Guided Reading curriculum and three cueing theory was even just on its face, and how many people went along with replacing phonics with Guided Reading despite that.

For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that there's no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that's a level of stupidity that's actually high enough to make me angry.

Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three cuing). Like, sure context can be a component of reading, but it's trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so clearly context isn't that important for strong readers, and teaching kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn't need a scientific study to figure that out.

naasking• 3 years ago

I think they've extended the meaning of "reading" to include a certain level of "understanding what you just read". Your nonsense sentence can't pass the latter test because there is no understanding to be gleaned, but it's not at all obvious that that should how we view reading exactly for that reason.

bcrosby952• 3 years ago

Correct, but I don't know if they've extended anything. When you say someone reads at the 12th grade level, it has never meant that they can superficially sound out every word, it means they can understand what the text is trying to say.

denton-scratch5• 3 years ago

covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it.

That produces kids that don't read, in the normal sense of the word; rather, they synthesize a text based on guesswork, and confidently declare that it says what it doesn't say. My daughter is a primary teacher, and has complained about this. It happens.

It seems completely barmy, to me.

Incidentally, it sounds a lot like what ChatGPT does.

riwsky• 3 years ago

It worked well enough for BERT: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)

tivert5• 3 years ago

It worked well enough for BERT: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)

Great, the next education fad will be trying to teach kids like some software engineer trained his algorithm.

"Hey kids, start your integration over this new 1TB data set. Remember to adjust your weights after each iteration!"

amluto• 3 years ago

BERT wasn’t learning how to read. It was learning how to predict (or generate or understand or whatever) text.

DonsDiscountGas• 3 years ago

It's true, masked-language-modelling has been hugely successful in natural language processing. So a priori I wouldn't have guessed it would work so poorly for humans and that phonics-based teaching is so much better. But the evidence is clear.

Just because MLM can work doesn't mean it does work in all contexts. We get to change the software (and hardware although that has been less relevant IMHO) behind ML models as much as we want, for humans we need to adapt the training methods.

fikama• 3 years ago

Your example sentence was incredibly hard to read for me. To be fair English isn't my primary language. But still, I think it could be that different people read in different ways, so some depend more on context than others, etc.

patwolf• 3 years ago

My kids go to a school that teaches phonics. Some of my teacher friends have told me that phonics is antiquated, so it does make me happy to see that perhaps it is the best method of learning to read. It has worked well for kids so far.

I will say though that the school's method of teaching phonics is much more rigorous than anything I ever learned as a kid. They have a long list of graphemes (letters and letter combinations), and they need to be able to recite all the phonemes (sounds) that each grapheme can make. I have a hard time answering their phonics questions, like if they ask me what sounds "ou" makes. It can make at least four sounds, e.g. sour, group, court, country. I can't confidentially help them without a cheatsheet.

cpif• 3 years ago

This reminds me of an article in the Atlantic I liked [1], which argued that the real problem for American education is that it places too much emphasis on the mechanics of reading comprehension, leaving content-oriented coursework such as history, science, and sociology on the back burner. Three-cueing or any other inference-based approach to reading isn't going to work when kids don't have enough knowledge about the world to make good inferences.

It's good to hear that phonics are making something of a comeback. But it seems like other things will need to change too. I spent some time teaching freshman English at a state university -- when a kid stumbles over a word like "infrastructure," one senses that the literacy problem goes beyond the sonic properties of printed text.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-rad...

rkapsoro• 3 years ago

Me, I stick with Stephen Krashen's hypothesis, borne out by my own experience: compelling, comprehensible input is the key. This applies to both your first language acquired when you are young and any other languages later.

Start with reading to kids, then give them access to wide selection of books to choose from. Comic books are good, too.

I have many criticisms of the education I received as a youngster, but they did get this right.

fwlr2• 3 years ago

The fact that the education system managed to forget how to teach kids how to read is unbelievably infuriating. I have been guilty in the past of rolling my eyes at “teachers are heroes, teachers should be paid like rockstars”. I don’t feel guilty anymore!

CalRobert2• 3 years ago

If teachers were paid like rockstars we'd be able to get better teachers.

yamtaddle3• 3 years ago

In my neck of the woods, if we paid teachers as well, by mid career, as gas station managers, we'd get better teachers.

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

Don't know how anyone who went through school would ever feel guilty about rolling their eyes at that.

fwlr2• 3 years ago

I went to a selective-entry single-gender public school, I have always just assumed my school experiences aren’t reflective of schools in general and refused to draw conclusions from my experiences.

gshubert17• 3 years ago

A similar tragedy was losing an effective treatment for scurvy, later rediscovered and connected with Vitamin C.

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

nmca2• 3 years ago

This is one of the most shocking things I have heard about in ages.

Because kids can't vote and don't have money they really do seem to get shafted in the US.

techaqua• 3 years ago

as a non-native english speaker. i don't understand and can't relate at all.

sebastianconcpt• 3 years ago

They broke training fresh neural networks for people while AI training gets the most careful and best supported and financed training. Which is already going exponential. What could go wrong?

edtechdev• 3 years ago

Educational researcher here. There's no such thing as a "science of reading." It's part of the highly politicized "reading wars" (see also the "math wars" which has been going on for decades). It's no coincidence that Republicans are pushing phonics as the end all be all solution to teaching reading, and you can cherry pick educational research studies that support or disconfirm various teaching strategies. Phonics has its place, contexts where it is appropriate and beneficial, but it is not the sole strategy that works or should be used in every context.

A recent meta-analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338494581_Meta-Anal... and the What Works Clearinghouse have summaries of the evidence for different strategies for improving early reading skills: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 Direct Instruction (also championed by one political side) is not an effective strategy: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/139

Here's just one post with a little more info on the political context: https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/01/14/does-the-science-o...

A bigger scandal is how states like Florida game the system to make their reading score rankings look higher: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-educati...

The good news is there are a lot of strategies that help with reading in various contexts. There's even research on how reading to dogs (or even robots) helps students with reading :)

vehemenz5• 3 years ago

I notice that the study you cite is measuring effectiveness in reading interventions. Obviously, that's where the data is coming from because we don't carefully track readers who learn successfully at a much earlier age.

However, I wonder if the ideal pedagogy would be different for younger students (maybe pre-K to 1st) who have less knowledge and smaller vocabularies? It's a bit tricky because a lot of the students who need intervention probably need remedial instruction in other areas too, but some of them may have been good students who struggled with reading.

mcv3• 3 years ago

I can't help but think of my youngest son. He's been having language development problems his whole life; barely spoke at 3. He got help, and he quickly become a very adept speaker, using complex sentence structures, though he does have a bit of a speech impediment. I already expected him to have trouble learning to read, and he did. It was hard, he hated it, and we received a lot of help with it.

One thing that struck me from this story is kids only wanting to read books they already know. My son was like that. He loves Dr Seuss books and has read the easier ones a dozen times, so he always proposes to read that instead of the new book we're trying to read.

Still, he reads a lot better now than some of the kids in the story. He's starting to pick up on random texts he runs into, reading subtitles (he's too slow though), so there's definitely progress. He's 8, which I think corresponds to grade 3 in the US system? He's about a year behind in reading, so if American kids a year older than that read worse than he does, that's not good.

Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages...

OkayPhysicist2• 3 years ago

Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages...

Sure, a language like Turkish (29 characters, 29 sounds) will be more phonetic, but English's eccentricities are overstated, with most boiling down to "unstressed vowels get shortened, shwa-ed, or skipped". Once you clear the first 50 or so words by frequency, it gets pretty sound-it-out for a good long time before you start hitting weird loan words.

nateburke• 3 years ago

No one is talking about the impact of kids seeing parents read on phones instead kids seeing parents read on books. When kids see a parent reading a book there's no doubt as to what they're doing. They are reading.

OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. There is a nonzero chance that it could be interpreted by the child as the parent watching a video. Or playing a game.

Children have a very powerful desire to imitate, and it should not be ignored in the debate on literacy.

mbrudd• 3 years ago

100%! We read to our kids a TON from the day they were born -- no tricks or gimmicks, we just read to them. A lot. And they've always seen us reading actual books. YMMV, but our kids learned to read early and well and they both still enjoy reading. A lot.

vorpalhex• 3 years ago

I'm not sure how you are reading to your kid but mine usually sits on my lap. He knows what is on the screen whether it's words or something else.

There's a "nonzero chance" your dead tree book is a game too ala Sudoku.

roydivision• 3 years ago

Great point. Children also have a powerful desire to know their parents are paying attention to them. Phones disrupt this as well.

AlwaysRock2• 3 years ago

Yup. Kids think my phone === games/videos. They know it can do other stuff but why would anyone use all those boring apps when games or videos are available?

euroderf4• 3 years ago

My 3yo gets about 10m a day of Khan Academy on my phone. That and video calls to mom are ALL he gets on my phone. Hopefully this is setting expectations for this particular technology/medium.

noodlenotes• 3 years ago

I don't think the kid even has to be confused about what the parent is doing.

If a kid sees a parent on the phone all the time (reading), they want to imitate being on the phone. The fact that the parent is reading is a second level distinction that matters less to young kids, especially when they can more easily imitate "using the phone" by playing games or watching videos.

tabbott• 3 years ago

For those readers who are skeptical whether this curriculum is really in widespread use, it definitely still is.

I have young kids and before listening to this podcast, my wife and I spent a bunch of time last Fall looking at schools for our eldest to start Kindergarten, because San Francisco's lottery system means there's no default school.

A lot of schools, even fancy private schools, used materials designed for this three cues reading curriculum. We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear".

These books had two problems that were obvious to us as parents: You don't need to know how to read in order to appear to read the book (just be shown the pattern for what to say on each page), and the books are _incredibly boring_ -- even our 2-year-old wouldn't be interested in reading such a book. The teachers we talked to said things that in retrospect echo the marketing lines for this curriculum that you here about in this podcast.

We Googled why these stupid books are being used in schools at all, and found https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... (An earlier article the by the host of the Sold a Story podcast). I recommend the article for folks who want to read something on the topic, though the podcast is the result of her considerably deeper investigation into why this is happening, and I highly recommend it as well for those who have the time.

We ended up sending our daughter to a Montessori school; we picked it for several reasons, but one observation is that because they have their own philosophy about how to teach reading and writing, they're relatively resilient to this sort of fake "science" based fad.

(Other things we saw visiting schools that made me sad included plentiful posters about the CUBES math strategy, which felt like an algorithm for being able to produce the correct answer to a word problem without actually reading and understanding the words -- i.e. an adaptation of the math curriculum to a world where many children struggle to read).

yamtaddle3• 3 years ago

We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear".

This horse-shit made one of my daughters backslide in reading for about 3/4 of kindergarten. She was progressing fast in Montessori school, then went backwards in ability for most of the (public school) kindergarten. Made her really lazy too, and seemed to shift what she thought reading was from "read the words" to "just guess", which, JFC. Recovered and then some, luckily, but god damn do I hate those starter leveled readers they used.

To expand, what these books do is have some pattern for a sentence, then every page is the same sentence with one word different, and you can guess which word with about 100% accuracy by just looking at the picture. So you just need to figure out the sentence once, then you can zoom through the book without reading another word.

They also had them do some computer reading program that had a feature that'd read the book to the kid. So guess what the kids all do, for their "reading time", some of them well into 1st and 2nd grade(!). They're not reading, just listening to books. WTF. Total waste of time and encouraging more reading-laziness.

All this means more work on our part to undo the harm. What a fucking waste of everyone's time, including and especially the kids.

ajsnigrutin• 3 years ago

A bit offtopic, but i find it interesting, how young kids ask A LOT of questions... "how does that work? why is that like that? Where did that come from? How come this is that? How do you do that? How did we do that befire this? ....", and then we put those kids through the schooling system, and the kids seem uninterested in anything, the questions stop and teaching them stuff becomes a pain for many.

Khaine8• 3 years ago

From the podcast:

"Here’s what’s happening to many children in this country. They go to a “balanced literacy” school that uses Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins. They’re taught the cueing strategies. Their reading ability is measured using leveled books. If they’re struggling – and someone notices – they might get Reading Recovery in first grade, where they get cueing and leveled books. And if they’re still struggling after that, many of them get Leveled Literacy Intervention. More cueing. More leveled books.

Struggling readers keep getting more of the same.

That’s what happened to Matthew. Missy’s son. In Gwinnett County, Georgia. She and her husband ended up hiring a private tutor to help Matthew. She remembers calling the tutor.

Purcell: And she was like, “You finally arrived at the place where most of us arrive.” She had given up on the idea that the school was going to teach her son how to read. And she’d decided she was going to have to take care of the problem herself. It’s what Corinne Adams did with her son Charlie. It’s what Lee Gaul did in New York City with his daughter Zoe. It’s what Kenni Alden in California wishes she had done with her son.

Missy says the private tutoring helped Matthew. But she felt like the balanced literacy instruction he was getting at school was undercutting what he was learning from his tutor. His tutor was teaching him how to decode words. At school he was being taught the cueing system. So last year she and her husband pulled him out of public school, and they put him in a private school for kids with dyslexia.

Matthew’s in sixth grade now. And Missy says he’s doing really well. After just one year at the private school, she says he was almost up to grade level in reading and writing.

For Missy, what’s especially painful about all this is that she had been a teacher. She advocated for Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell in her school district. She taught other teachers how to do balanced literacy with the cueing and the leveled books."

Dnguyen• 3 years ago

This is just my personal experience. My first son was able to read when he was 2.5 yo. I read Dr. Suess to him every night since he was 1 yo. At first I would read and let him finish the last word in the sentence, the rhyming part. One day I asked him to try reading the whole sentence and he did. I thought maybe I read to him so much that he memorized it, as I was starting to memorized some of the books. I switch to different book and he was able to read a few sentences. I tried a book we haven't read yet (higher level Dr. Suess's book) and he was able to read 20%. Taking turn on the pages made it fun and I tried to exaggerate some of the words to make it more dramatic, like CRASH!!!. Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that. Being a public support station, they tend to have sponsor promotions quite a bit, so my son was listing to classical music and people talking. I believe the music and the talking sound got him to be familiar with English phonic early, so when it comes to reading, the rhythm is not so strange. Sadly, with the second son, we had to split time with two kids and more work, we didn't do the same routine. He was barely reading when he got into kindergarden. But thank God he had a great teacher in 1st grade, over zoom she taught most of the class to read. My kids actually excelled during pandemic teaching over zoom. Of course we were there to help them along. I think reading is priority one for any kid. Once they learn to read, they are more independent, read menu and decide for themselves, read instructions to build LEGOs, read street names, really open the world to them.

passion__desire2• 3 years ago

Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that.

Trevor Noah talking about how he learnt German.

https://youtu.be/2PWSJH02krs?t=56

So I started learning. I learned in different ways, you know - to watch German movies, play German speeches on my iPod when I sleep. Your brain remembers things you don't even know. It's beautiful.

legacynl2• 3 years ago

Learning by listening to something during your sleep doesn't work. Brains go into a sort of maintenance mode during sleep, and it's not possible for your brain to sleep and interpret & comprehend sensory input at the same time.

Most likely the noise will have a negative effect on the length and quality of your sleep, which does have a proven negative effect on memory.

So it's probably better for you to learn while your awake and just sleep at night.

shadowtree• 3 years ago

China has a 99.7% youth literacy rate - isn't that enough proof in regards to which method works best?

Khaine8• 3 years ago

Again from the podcast:

Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?

Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.

These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that were known to be wrong because they don't like the style of the effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach people because you don't like an effective approach is criminal.

Again from the podcast:

"Good reading instruction isn’t boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring. But this shouldn’t be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need.

And there’s no reason that reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can’t be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she’s now selling."

milesskorpen2• 3 years ago

Yes, early elementary reading education should include phonics. Calkins would agree - her first reading curriculum (which is relatively new compared to her writing work) tells schools using the program to supplement it with a phonics curriculum; That wasn't her specialty (just like she doesn't cover math and history). Reducing all reading instruction to phonics is wildly reductive, and her program does a good job at the non-phonics components (and possibly phonics too now? I believe they've added a lot more of that to the base curriculum with the recent revisions, but no personal experience).

polotics2• 3 years ago

I think we should all stop using the term "phonics".

If you read the whole article I think you will agree that what you call "phonics" is actually just "reading"...

All of the rest, the context, cues, word-recognition, is something on top of seeing the letters, knowing the sound the make individually, knowing the sound they make when put in sequence. Good readers still see all the letters, don't work on guessing context, looking for cues, or seeing words as unified pictures.

cjohnson3182• 3 years ago

Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another.

Yeah dude, people expect you to be able to explain your reasoning. Even reasoning that you did in the past(!) which is pretty much all of it.

night815• 3 years ago

Exactly, isn't the point of research to publish your findings which explains the WHY?

setgree2• 3 years ago

These people belong in gaol.

Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if it were.

Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she persuaded them through teaching and advocacy.

FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable civil case against Teacher's College, and other places where teachers were taught this nonsense, for harms done. If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit. But we don't generally put teachers and doctors in the same bucket; for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.

Khaine8• 3 years ago

This isn't a free speech issue. This is a matter of fraud. Claiming you have methods of teaching literacy when you don't is fraud. Lying or pressuring congressman to get government grants is equally fraud.

brodouevencode• 3 years ago

Nit:

If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit

But we don't see one with respect to popular nutritional advice, which is in a very dismal state with the old food pyramid being promoted as the way and no one can agree on anything because nothing is reproducible.

So, maybe not the best analogy.

xapata6• 3 years ago

Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal.

It is for certain professions. And the criteria for civil liability are much lighter than that for criminal liability. All professionals should carry liability insurance. And, they should operate under the protection of a limited liability company or something similar.

hn_version_0023• 3 years ago

for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.

Well, you've hit upon a thing I'd like to see teachers actually do! Nice, thanks for that.

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

Bob The Builder got my child started.

I didn't read to her most nights, btw. I told her a multi-year bedtime story instead.

HeckFeck2• 3 years ago

I have a young cousin, he's recently had his sixth birthday. Reading is completely novel for him. He loves it. Even though he doesn't fully understand the words, he will point to letters and sound them, then he will read the full word aloud. It is an almost majestic thing to witness; he is so pleased with himself when he gets the words right. He was reading everything he could find that had letters in my house.

Let's put him down for a future bookworm? Anecdote as it may be, it is evidence that phonics is the natural way to go. I don't think he'd have the same joy if I pointed to the words and said 'that shape means blue' or whatever.

Discovering the underlying logic then making it your own is what makes learning anything a pleasure. Indeed, how many of us on this forum would enjoy learning to program were it taught the same way?

throwaway8503• 3 years ago

Hot take, but: the same issue is present in math, with the aggressive deprioritization of rote learning of arithmetic. People need a foundation upon which to build higher concepts; knowing your times tables is necessary to grasp division algorithms.

The emphasis (in reading, and math) on the wider concepts rather than the boring learning is a problem.

hitgeek• 3 years ago

I heard of this story years ago, and was very dismayed. (There is no date on this website is this something new?)

however the last 2 years I've experienced kids being taught to read in US public school kindergarten and the curriculum was nothing like was described in this series. They were taught phonics and memorized common non-phonetic words the same way I was taught 30 years ago.

pitaj6• 3 years ago

It's likely you got lucky or your state / school district already changed the curriculum.

The podcast goes into how over the past few years, there has been a lot of activism to shift schools from cueing back to phonics. At various levels of government, including state laws.

game_the0ry• 3 years ago

A couple of thoughts form my own anecdotal evidence:

* My mother was a stay-at-home mom and some of the earliest memories I have is her teaching me to read.

* I had difficulty in school and I did not fit in. My social issues spilled into the classroom, my grades suffered, i was picked on a lot, and I was usually put in remedial classes (you know those smaller classes with like 5 students). Yet I got a 1460 on my SATs, +700 on SATIIs, and went to USNews top 25 college (~20% acceptance rate at the time, ~12% now).

I have gotten more social since, but it left me with the impression that public school can do more harm than good. I am pro school choice and will seriously consider homeschooling.

WeylandYutani• 3 years ago

We've been teaching kids to read for 200 years so why does anything need to be changed? Invest in more teachers not new fancy methods.

dragonwriter3• 3 years ago

We've been teaching kids to read for 200 years so why does anything need to be changed?

We've been gathering and making food for much longer than 200 years, and we keep changing that, too.

7thaccount2• 3 years ago

My kid is six and can read 100+ page kids books in about an hour (she doesn't do this super often though). It wasn't too hard to teach her to get there either, but repetition is key.

We started when she was 4 by reciting all the sounds each letter could do each night. It used to take us almost an hour to get to Z, but eventually she got it down fast. I tried to make it as fun as possible. Then we would do two to three letter words and have her figure out the words by using those sounds (sometimes trying various combinations until something made sense). We did that a few nights each week for a few months while she was playing. You can't force it, but I could usually get a few words in here and there. Then we started very simple sentences with the various Bob, Learning Dynamics...etc books. This was a big shift, but became easy soon enough. After she got through ~50 of those short little books, we moved on to the beginning chapter books when she was almost 6. She could earn certain privileges like TV if she reads a book. I kept reading to her (story time) as well each night. She's in kindergarten and reads like a champ now. Her school work goes over additional phonics stuff which is good to fill in any gaps she got from my very non-academic methods (I never really learned the rules as a kid...I just liked reading and I guess picked things up organically). It's pretty cool that she can pretty much just read anything now that isn't a very unusual word you just have to know. She sometimes guesses at words though that are wrong, so we're working on slowing down a little bit.

It's a balancing act though. You don't want to make it such a chore that they don't want to read later, but I just don't think the math and reading is very good at school so far, so I'm trying to supplement. Spending a few hours on reading and math outside of school each week seems to eat up a small amount of free time, but lead to big successes.

obscurette5• 3 years ago

Teacher, educator and father of three kids here. I strongly disagree that "there is not enough evidence based science in teaching" etc. If there is something really to highlight what's wrong with education systems all over the world, it's too much "evidence based science". Every educational psychologist and his dog has a novel theory how learning works, how something should be taught and have a ton of evidence why. And of course all generations of educators so far have been idiots. It's THE reason nobody wants to teach any more.

"Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession." (https://archive.ph/MEqrK)

The truth every teacher faces is that there is no single silver bullet. There is no any "method" in education that can replace simple things – time, effort, motivation, affiliation etc.

danielmarkbruce4• 3 years ago

You are saying "the evidence is bullshit", right?

obscurette5• 3 years ago

No. I mean that it's not hard to gather evidence to back even very stupid teaching methods if you simply put enough effort and time to it.

nostromo2• 3 years ago

I think you're right, but for the wrong reasons.

Actual evidence-based science would be fantastic. But a lot of what I've seen being touted as "science" in this field is flimsy or not science at all.

The primary cause is the downfall of research done by universities. Our institutions are churning out mountains of bullshit "science" in certain fields, including in education. This junk science is now being pushed down into the classroom and it's devastating for educators and students.

Once I was consulting a very large family foundation in this space and asked why there are no randomized trials in education. I was told that researchers in the space think it's unethical to conduct studies with control groups on students. (Which, to be clear, is moronic.) The result is there's very little in the way of solid evidence about what even works.

euroderf4• 3 years ago

A book I bought (its name escapes me ATM) said, make word-only flash cards (no pix needed) of things your kid can directly relate to. Like body parts. Then colors and numbers.

It seemed to work. We could play a "body parts game" where I shuffle the deck and we go thru it one at a time: he points to the part I name... and gradually he took over reading them.

aguynamedben• 3 years ago

If you have a 3-4 year old: Bob Books

hondo77• 3 years ago

People are different. Phonics helped my sister. I had no use for them. We both know how to read.

xkjyeah• 3 years ago

So, Americans decided to make their language as difficult to read as Chinese?!? Well done...

bryansum• 3 years ago

The Right to Read movie talks about this very topic, and features the author of this podcast: https://www.therighttoreadfilm.org/

Khaine8• 3 years ago

Again from the podcast:

"This is Sarah Gannon. She’s a teacher you met in Episode 3. She trusted Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins

Gannon: I trusted that they’re experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading. She believed in the cueing and the leveled books. The first time she encountered criticism of that approach was in 2019, after one of my articles came out.

Gannon: Teacher friends were like, “Did you read this Emily Hanford? And I was like, “I read it.” And we were like, “What is she talking about?” She was outraged. Because a journalist was questioning the way she taught reading.

And then, her daughter, Maeve.

(Music) Maeve wasn’t learning how to read. Sarah tried to teach her. But it wasn’t working. So Sarah went looking for answers. And discovered the research.

Gannon: I changed because I had to. There was no choice. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing with Maeve. The same thing happened to Carrie Chee. She was one of the Lucy Calkins fans you met in an earlier episode. The one who didn’t like George Bush.

One day, when Carrie’s daughter was in elementary school, she came to her mother and she said, “I have something to tell you.”

Carrie Chee: My child looked at me and she was really nervous and anxious, and she just says, “I can’t read.” The school hadn’t said there was a problem. Carrie hadn’t noticed a problem either. But her daughter knew.

Chee: She knew. They know. You know, the kids know first. The parents know second. The teacher chimes in third. And then, you know, the hunt is on for help. Some kids try to keep it a secret when they’re struggling. They can look like they’re reading for a while. But as the words get longer and the pictures go away, it all kind of falls apart.

(Music ends) Carrie Chee was a 7th grade English teacher before she had her daughter. She says she always had struggling readers in her class. A lot of them. And the only thing she knew to do was to try to find them books about things they were interested in.

Chee: And I just kept saying, “Well keep trying.” And then when they couldn't, I just thought they didn't want to try. And what I’m haunted by is, when it wasn’t working, I blamed it on children. Carrie Chee isn’t sure she would have learned anything about the science of reading if it weren’t for her experience with her own child. Sarah Gannon too. If everything had been fine with her daughter, she thinks she might still be dismissing all of this science of reading stuff.

Gannon: I don’t know if I could be convinced and that’s what worries me. You know, I have good friends who are very smart, incredibly talented educators who, it’s just like, hold fast to old beliefs. And I think, I, honestly, I think I would be one of them. You know. But I guess you have to say, like, it’s OK to be wrong. Like, I was wrong."

How many of their students have been irreparably damaged from their incompetence and unprofessionalism. It took for their family to be personally impacted that they actually looked into the research. If a doctor gave medicine that had terrible consequences without looking into it what would happen? Or an engineer who didn't look into the structural properties of a material and a bridge collapsed what would happen? What has happened to these educators, and those who advocated for this practices?

samstave• 3 years ago

Teaching a kid to read is about spending time with your kids seriously.

It's parent child bonding

Read to your kids as much as possible

WalterBright3• 3 years ago

"Why Johnny Can't Read" from 1954 is as fresh as ever.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about/dp/0060913...

WalterBright3• 3 years ago

One reason for teaching so long using a failed method is public school teachers are not accountable for failure. There is zero downside for them failing (they just blame the parents) and no incentive whatsoever to do better.

The fix is simple. Give teachers a $1000 bonus for every student of theirs that performs at grade level at the end of the year.

It'll be the cheapest, most effective way to improve kids' education.

CobrastanJorji• 3 years ago

Metric-based rewards are hard to get right. For example, you've just disincentivized teachers from working with struggling students, and you've further incentivized teachers to work in the richest school districts. Since the metric is "how many at at grade level at the end of the year," you as a teacher are heavily rewarded for being handed students that are either already at grade level or have parents who can pay for additional tutoring.

The simplest fix you could slap on would be to make it a bonus for each student who tested as below grade level at the start of the year but above grade level at the end, but that also has complexities.

WalterBright3• 3 years ago

Of course, implementing such a program will have details that need to be worked out. I've posted this before, and get all kinds of "but ..." replies, all of which can be easily addressed with a moment's thought.

It could be hardly worse than the current system.

you as a teacher are heavily rewarded for being handed students that are either already at grade level or have parents who can pay for additional tutoring.

Students are already assigned at random to teachers. So it will balance out.

you've just disincentivized teachers from working with struggling students

The teachers currently have no incentive whatsoever to help struggling students. This proposal gives them $1000 reasons to help them.

bradgranath• 3 years ago

TLDR: Adults don't like the sound of children sounding out words slowly and would prefer not to have to listen to it.

The old way of getting around this was having kids memorize whole words.

That never really worked, so the new technique is to teach them several different strategies to guess what it is they are reading.

It turns out (no duh) that doesn't work either, but it does mask the signs of illiteracy, so that intervention ends up coming later.

timthorn• 3 years ago

The UK faced the same challenge but has mostly ensured that now synthetic phonics is the standard method of instruction. The success of this programme has really been down to a single key politician in the Department for Education, Nick Gibb. He's never had a cabinet role so didn't get deeply caught up in reshuffles, and for most of the past 13 years he's been the Schools Minister. The TES ran a profile of him and his phonics drive recently, a good followup to the Sold a Story series: http://archive.today/ee9LA

noufalibrahim• 3 years ago

I'm a heavy advocate of homeschooling and did that with my kids for a while before personal circumstances made it impractical for me. I used the book "The Well trained mind" as a general curriculum guide and bought books which it recommended. The one it pushed for teaching reading was https://welltrainedmind.com/p/the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-...

I used this for my first two kids and am currently using it for my third. They pick up reading proficiency in a few months and you need to consistently spend about 20-30 minutes a day. The bonding that comes with your kids is an added bonus. After that, you establish a reading culture at home, blanket ban on electronic "entertainment" for the early years and they become good readers very quickly.

I lived in a bit of a bubble and when I met my kids' friends when they went to school, it was painful to see how crippled they were with basics skills and also tragic to see my own kids regress to the average in these skills.

The upshot of all this is that basic liberal education is not that hard to do for ones own kids and it gives them a lifelong advantage. I highly recommend it.

rickdicker• 3 years ago

On the final episode, something that kind of bothers me here is the generally antagonistic attitude towards the "get kids excited about reading" approach. The whole series focuses on the struggling students who were wronged by misguided one-size-fits-all teaching, and then the narrator goes on to assert that students don't need to be sold the joys of reading because, "look at these sound bites of kids learning to read - they sure seem excited to me!" Kind of annoying to see someone so dismissive of the notion after spending four hours talking about how not all kids pick things up through osmosis.

pklausler• 3 years ago

On a book suggestion subreddit that I follow there are way too many queries of the form "I've never read a book, can you recommend one to start with?"

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

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