11 Comments

What an utter train wreck. Other countries must look at us with a mixture of bewilderment and disdain as we slide continually downward.

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Our educational systems are as corrupted as the medieval Catholic Church, completely beholden to unions whose main job is to prevent bad teachers from being fired, an Education Department under whose watch educational attainment has done nothing but steadily decline, and charlatans with institutional backing of the kind described in this article. We need school vouchers and school choice ASAP, private enterprises displaying this level of incompetence and disregard for their customers would go out of business but government schools can continue to suck for decades because the government can always raise taxes or otherwise subsidize unremitting failure.

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This whole concept blows my mind. I was born in the early 90s, and I was definitely taught the phonics method. I learned French and Spanish as an adult, and I was taught to read in those languages the exact same way—by learning how the consonants, vowels, and phonics sounded.

Now all the tiffs I have gotten into with social-justice belligerents who ask me, “CANT YOU READ?!” when they’ve clearly undercut themselves on an argument by quoting something from an op-ed are all making sense now. 😳

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Illiteracy creates a whole hell of a lot of anger in the person who can't even read with understanding the label on a carton of orange juice. The big club you can't join and you'll never understand why. In my long-ago somewhat misspent very early adulthood, I was befriended by a couple of fairly low-level drug dealers (and they were genuinely good friends to me) and the older one was illiterate, which I discovered to my great shock. A smart guy entrepreneurial sort of guy, and if he'd had the basic tools of a civilized society he might have headed in a different direction. (The other one could read and his day job was as a car mechanic...)

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I have first hand experience with this. My son was being taught to read in 1st grade according to the whole word method in a private school; he made no progress with reading and it became something that was unbearable for him. We took him out of his private school and I taught him to read myself using only phonics, he made amazing progress and today he’s a great reader in 3rd grade. With my second son, also homeschooled, he’s only ever been taught to read through phonics and he’s never struggled with reading, always on track. I’ve been to homeschooling conventions and spoke to hundreds of homeschool parents and have never met anyone who didn’t follow the phonics method, they all emphasized the importance of phonics in elementary.

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Yes, many parents and grandparents teach reading by ‘sound it out’ and usually same parents who read to their children early. Thank goodness for this because many schools and teachers are to embedded with union rules instead of teaching rules.

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I've enjoyed reading this series, but I know a little something about this particular subject and the treatment of Goodman's reading research is greatly simplified and misleading. We all use multiple cueing systems when we read--our background knowledge of the subject, our knowledge of how English syntax works, and our understanding of the letter-sound system in English. Goodman's work encourages teachers and therapists to help children use ALL the cueing systems, including the phonological (letter-sound) cueing system, to support them as they learn to read and become proficient readers. Conflating Ken and Yetta Goodman's work with the "whole word" or "look say" method is simply incorrect. As a speech-language pathologist working with children with literacy problems, giving children multiple tools for reading success has been extremely beneficial and successful.

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