The Reading Debacle

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

The Reading Debacle (Part 12). In October of 2018, a New York Times editorial by Emily Hanford posed a question: "Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?" The sub-headline gave the answer: Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers.

How long have they been ignoring it? At least since 1955. That's when Rudolf Flesch shocked the American public with a book called "Why Johnny Can't Read.” This book revealed that elementary school teachers were downplaying the alphabet and treating English words as if they were Chinese characters to be memorized by the way they looked. This was the so-called "look-say" or "whole word" method of teaching reading, and it had no scientific backing. On the contrary, studies going back to 1911 pointed to the superiority of the sound-it-out method, otherwise known as phonics.

Though the "whole word" method was never backed by science, it was backed by something more important: the ed school establishment because the person who popularized this method for its use in elementary schools was William S. Gray, the dean of Chicago's School of Education. This ed school backing meant that even after the “whole word method” was on life support, it could be repackaged in scientific-sounding language and pumped right back into teacher training schools. And that's exactly what happened starting in the late 70s with the rise of the "whole language movement" developed and popularized by Kenneth Goodman and his wife, Yetta Goodman, both professors of education.

In 1991, the Goodmans even published The Whole Language Catalog, modeled on the counterculture Whole Earth Catalog from the 60s and 70s. The Whole Language Catalog featured hundreds of advertisements for whole language books in the same way that The Whole Earth Catalog advertised Swiss Army knives and L.L. Bean hunting boots. The Whole Language Catalogue also featured hundreds of testimonials from converts to the cause, one of whom was a person by the name of Lucy McCormick Calkins, who wrote a poetic meditation on taking her young sons back to the lakeside cabin in Michigan, where she'd spent her summers as a child.

The point of the meditation is how much she would be learning from her children as they interact with nature in this beautiful setting, which is itself part of the whole language ideology.

How so?

Well, the "whole language" or "3-cueing" method teaches beginning readers to decipher words they haven't seen before not by first sounding out the letters, but by first guessing at what the word might be from the context of the sentence or a picture, if there's one on the page; and second, by guessing at the kind of word—a noun or a verb—which you might expect in the sentence. Coming in third and last place is looking at the actual letters that make up the word. Hovering over this 3-queing technique is the basic premise of the "whole language" movement, which is that reading is a natural process, and that if you just surround children with books in a stimulating environment, like a lakeside cabin in Michigan, and tell them how exciting reading is, they'll pick it up on their own.

Despite another 30 years’ worth of evidence showing the massive failures of the whole language method, it remains to this day the dominant method taught in ed schools. A 2019 Education Week survey found that two-thirds of ed school professors continue to teach it, and 75% of elementary and special education teachers continue to use it in their classrooms.

But in the Fall of 2020, something remarkable happened. The head of the reading and writing project at Teachers College, the most influential ed school in the nation for more than 100 years, released something she called “Postcards From a Journey,” in which she admitted in the most roundabout way possible that contrary to what she and her fellow whole language enthusiasts had been claiming for decades in bestselling textbooks and teacher's guides, maybe there was something to this phonics business after all. That looking at the letters first rather than last (i.e. sounding them out) is perhaps a good idea.

The person sending this "Postcard From a Journey" was none other than Professor Lucy Calkins, who 30 years earlier had talked about learning from her own children while summering in a lakeside cabin in Michigan.

I mention this to make a point. Many children have learned how to read despite the quackery of whole language. But many of them will have done so only because they have parents, siblings or grandparents who will teach them their ABCs and teach them to sound out words even before they've started school. That's just the kind of advantaged environment that Professor Calkins and her own children grew up in. The kids without these advantages, who won't be summering in a lakeside cabin in Michigan, are the kids most damaged by whole language ideology because they're the kids who have a 30 million word deficit by the time they're three, as I explained in the last video.

And since these disadvantaged kids come disproportionately from minority communities, this reading disaster brought to you by ed schools like Teachers College, is doing the most damage to the very kids that ed schools and their graduates constantly claim to care so much about: black, Latino and low-income students whose disproportionate rates of delinquency, poverty and incarceration correlate with disproportionate rates of illiteracy and difficulty in school.

Shortly after Professor Caulkins' "Postcard From a Journey" was released, the superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District in Texas made just this point on social media when she asked if Caulkins would be, quote, "handing out refunds for all the intervention needed for the missed learning opportunity. Our most vulnerable students—black, brown, poor and special education students," she said, "paid the ultimate cost."

So what does this add up to for K through 12 education in the United States? Let's turn from Professor Lucy Calkins' "Postcard From a Journey" to the Report Card on a Nation—the 2019 National Report on Educational Progress. Here we find that only 36% of public high school seniors are proficient in reading, 25% in writing, 24% in math, and 11% in American history.

And as bad as those numbers are, they are even worse when we focus solely on kids coming from minority and low-income communities. In 2019 only 15% of black eighth-graders were rated proficient in reading. Only 5% rated proficient in geography and history. So you might well ask, given their horrendous record in K through 12 education (especially where low income and minority students are concerned) how is it that ed school graduates were ever allowed to take on leadership roles in higher education, in, of all things, social justice, and educational equity?

I'll answer that question in the next video.

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)