I is for Illiterate. Time to Sue.
December 5, 2024 8:31 AM   Subscribe

Claiming developmental and emotional injuries, Massachusetts parents are suing three renowned literacy specialists (Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell) alleging they deliberately ignored the scientific consensus about the importance of phonics to early reading to the detriment of their children’s learning.

The lawsuit alleges the defendants ignored a plethora of research demonstrating the importance of phonics, or the relationship between letters and sounds, in creating, marketing, and selling their early literacy products and services. The omission of phonics from their curriculums was intentional, the complaint alleges, despite widely known evidence of its importance, and amounted to “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing practices.

In 2022, Calkins updated her best-selling and highly regarded curriculum to add in more phonics. Too little too late, as Columbia University' Teacher College has shuttered the Calkins program.

In 2021, the Fountas and Pinell system was found exceedingly lacking in independent studies and most Massachusetts schools removed use and the state created a $200,000 fund to replace the curriculum.

If you want to get some real literacy specialist/reading support people opinions, look here and even at Reddit. Professionals have been saying FOR YEARS that they were both terrible programs, but districts purchased them anyway and forced teachers to use them.

Sold a Story is a terrific podcast that unpacks and helps to explain the Wild West of teaching reading.

Can people successfully sue a school? Sure. Teachers? Sure. Curriculum creators? Let's see.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes (116 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Good. I am lucky that my child was reading fine before school and is young enough that this shit wasn't forced on him. I can't imagine how frustrating and infuriating it must have been for so many parents to stand by and watch while their kids are told to mess around and guess wtf a word is while the information of what letters make what sounds is intentionally (sadistically?) withheld.

I was only thinking of higher ed when this stuff first rolled out so I don't know much about that period. It remains astounding that a few people could swindle an entire educational sector so thoroughly. I'm sure there were many factors leading to this, but it's hard not to think that the bullshit tech-bro worship of "disruption" and all the money thrown at people for "breaking things" in that domain didn't have something to do with the cultural landscape that let this happen.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:43 AM on December 5, 2024 [10 favorites]


I'm going to sue because my kids can't write cursive. /s
posted by pthomas745 at 8:56 AM on December 5, 2024 [6 favorites]


You Were Probably Taught to Read Wrong —PBS Otherwords
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:06 AM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


Suing stops this curriculum, but doesn't bring literacy to the kids it failed to educate. Better ends could be achieved if curricula were validated for effectiveness before being widely distributed.
posted by otherchaz at 9:06 AM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


I can't imagine not having learned phonics. When sounding out words really clicked for me, I felt like I had discovered a superpower and the world around had suddenly come into focus
posted by treepour at 9:13 AM on December 5, 2024 [21 favorites]


I don't have kids. I recently heard about this dropping of phonics and was completely astonished. My first thought was "Why?" ... was there some problem that had arisen since the days when I learned... because of phonics? Or had some other miraculous system replaced it? I never heard a good description of what replaced this method of learning, nor why it was replaced.

Reading some of the articles in this post just makes me angry. If anything, mathematics should be looked at for ways to teach differently. I remember having a terrible time with math as a kid (I'm still not good) and yes, getting extremely angry, irrationally angry about my "inability" to learn and the head-banging frustration I felt sitting in front of a math workbook feeling completely lost and inadequate and miserable. I can still flash back to those exact feelings even fifty years later. I'm imagining these kids struggling with reading using this new "better" system and it breaks my heart.

Thanks for this post. I will be looking into this more.
posted by SoberHighland at 9:13 AM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]


something something something Let's Teach AI In Schools something something

(educational manias rarely end well; edtech is no exception; AI certainly won't be either)
posted by humbug at 9:14 AM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


I homeschooled three kids who learned to read between, oh, 2005-2013. When my kids were little, "balanced literacy" and the like were very big among homeschoolers, but it always seemed to me like it was an example of taking as a model the way kids who are naturally gifted at reading, and trying to get all kids to learn to read that way. One of my three basically barely needed us to point out that "letters represent speech sounds" and he was off to the races; one of them didn't read fluently until she was 9 or 10, despite lots of readalouds and reading practice and phonics-related stuff (we loved the Bob Books a lot). She can actually tell you what it was like, over the space of a week or so, for the words on pages to become intelligible, and she immediately became a voracious reader. I expected my early/easy reader to be the book nerd, but he is not.

Our youngest went to school through second grade, and the curriculum in our district hit him exactly where he was at, developmentally. He was neither too fast nor too slow for it, neither ahead of behind. We used to joke that he was the Modal Early Reader.

Which is to say that I had three kids whose paths to reading were very different, but they all definitely incorporated phonics.

It's very interesting to me that there is a lawsuit about this now, aimed at curriculum creators and promoters. It points out who has responsibility for educating children, and raises questions of who is accountable when they don't learn. I do notice this:
Conley, according to the complaint, had to enroll two of her children in private school to get access to phonics-based reading instruction. One of the children, identified as S.C., required year-round private tutoring to address her reading deficits.
That tells me a lot, if I hadn't already figured it out, about who sues. Schools have been turning out generations of illiterate and innumerate people of color and poor people (my own city a notable example; I taught community college for many years and dealt with their outcomes), but people who don't have the resources to move their kids to private school or pay for year-round tutors also don't have the resources to sue.

I will be watching this case with interest.

Addendum: I always thought things like "picture cues," mentioned in the article, were bullshit. A picture accompanying even a short piece of text can be so ambiguous, or offer so many hints, that trying to use it to predict text strikes me as prima facie near-useless. And yet curriculum experts, school districts, teachers, and homeschool parents somehow didn't notice that.

Also, to add: this is also an example (and a lot of homeschool curricula back in the day had this problem) of building a curriculum based on a theory you have created about how children learn, not based on observation or study of what children actually do when learning, or how the activities a child does relate to outcomes. One of the common arguments for this kind of curriculum in the homeschool community was that reading was something children could learn the same way they picked up their native language, by being exposed to text a lot, recognizing patterns, generalizing from what they observe and testing their observations, adjusting their actions as they get more feedback and experience. But there is no reason in the world to think that reading (or just about any other activity) is equivalent to the language-learning that is wired into our brains.
posted by Well I never at 9:17 AM on December 5, 2024 [16 favorites]


In other Massachusetts-parents-suing-educators news: School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules
A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment.

Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son's grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.

The incident occurred in December 2023 when RNH was a junior. The school determined that RNH and another student "had cheated on an AP US History project by attempting to pass off, as their own work, material that they had taken from a generative artificial intelligence ('AI') application," Levenson wrote. "Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application, including citations to nonexistent books (i.e., AI hallucinations)."
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:19 AM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


Previously, Peach wrote an excellent comment on literacy education, phonics, curricula, and oversimplification.

(Be aware that some of the rage around phonics is associated with culture wars against woke public schools.)
posted by away for regrooving at 9:22 AM on December 5, 2024 [16 favorites]


If anything, mathematics should be looked at for ways to teach differently.
This is absolutely ongoing, both in terms of scholarly research as well as curricula development. This move to ignore phonics is not like say, teaching different methods other than "carry the one" for doing addition, it's more akin to refusing to teach kids what numerals stand for, and hoping that they'll be able to figure out what 18+27 is with some guessing and maybe looking at some pictures or other numbers on the page. It's a fucking disgrace to educational research that these people poisoned the well so badly. My best guess is Calkins is/was just drunk on her own kool-aid, and also was happy to rake in money by moving fast and breaking things. I hope she lives long enough to understand what damage she has wrought and lose all of her ill-gotten gains.

On preview: I'm glad Peach understands that these methods should be "both/and" instead of "either/or", but the sad fact is that's not how the curricula were implemented at the many (thousands?) schools that just stopped teaching phonics.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:24 AM on December 5, 2024 [11 favorites]


I'm a phonics enthusiast who's been following these debates/trends for years.

Those wondering Why not phonics? here's a reason - If the kid can sound out (for example) 'cheetah' but has never encountered that word before, and has neither the experience nor resources to look the word up in the dictionary, then context is everything - hence the guessing strategies.
posted by Rash at 9:25 AM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


My son is 15. Avid reader. Mostly an A student. Can't spell worth a damn and can't sound out unfamiliar words to save his life. I 100% blame lack of phonics education.

There was such a strong focus on sight recognition of words, but for cripe's sake, English uses a phonetic alphabet, not a logographic/ideographic one. Sight recognition works great for words you know but doesn't help AT ALL for unfamiliar words. If you can sound it out, you can recognize that this unfamiliar-looking word might be a word you recognize aurally, having heard it spoken...
posted by caution live frogs at 9:27 AM on December 5, 2024 [12 favorites]


One of the problems with using phonics exclusively is that English words are often not spelled the way they are pronounced, they are non-phonetic. This is probably because English is a kind of conglomerate language with words that came from a variety of other languages. Non-phonetic words are less common in languages like Spanish. In order to become fluent in reading English kids really need teachers who can use a combination of methods.
posted by mareli at 9:31 AM on December 5, 2024 [14 favorites]


treepour: To this day I am still delighted to run across words that I do not recognize. I try to sound them out, even if they are in a language I don't understand (say, a single German term in an otherwise English text... I only read/speak/write English). I try to get the etymology based on stuff that I already know, the context, etc. I try to sound out how the word is spoken. I do this out of my own curiosity... this isn't me taking a test or anything, just reading for fun.

Usually I will look up the word's meaning right on the spot (easy when reading online). Even after reading the meaning, I will go back and try to figure out some of the etymology just out of curiosity! I will add that I am not a genius or even a very widely read person. I have good language skills, but I am not a student of languages by any means. The phonics is a base part of my innate curiosity.

Not even having the ability to do that is gobsmacking to me. What the hell is the written/printed word other than abstract squiggles that emulate the sounds of what another person is thinking or saying? Having no phonics background (or very little) is hard for me to imagine.
posted by SoberHighland at 9:34 AM on December 5, 2024 [6 favorites]


In every industry there's always folks pushing change for reasons other than better outcomes. (see many corporate re-orgs that exist only to make the bosses seem like they're tackling problems or system rebuilds that exist because architects want to embrace the new) and there will always be hustlers out there happy to provide consultancy services and the required shovels and pickaxes.

My mom, an English teacher as established in other comments, for some reason got me a set of "Hooked on Phonics" when I was a kid. I was already reading above level by a lot, but what the heck - multiple methods are always best.

(Having said that, it's also a nightmare for teachers to juggle approaches trying to reach their various kids)
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:35 AM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


mareli: true, but early English reading lessons generally stick to simple words that can be easily sounded out based on the English pronunciation of the alphabet. I don't think anyone is arguing phonics is the only part of learning how to read.
posted by SoberHighland at 9:36 AM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]


How does phonics help with larger problems of contextual reading---how does phonics help with the social context of a text? Like being able to read words is fine, but doesn't whole language allow for this kind of wholistic understanding?
posted by PinkMoose at 9:40 AM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]


PinkMoose, I don't know of anyone who teaches phonics in a vacuum. Students are still being read to, talking about the structure of stories, and doing many other activities that help them with holistic understanding. The idea is that structured phonics education is necessary for most children to actually learn how to read the words on the page. It's as essential as knowing math facts before starting to do multi-step problems. I think there's a certain amount of push back because some of us learned to read without phonics, or because it seems like the sort of boring "rote memorization" that education is always trying to distance itself from, but the science is very clear that without direct instruction in phonics, many students will not learn how to read.
posted by chaiminda at 9:46 AM on December 5, 2024 [15 favorites]


Calkins is a cult leader.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:48 AM on December 5, 2024


Yeah, chaiminda, that's the typical complaint with phonics in learning to read - it's boring. And we all know how easy it is, becoming bored, these days.
posted by Rash at 9:52 AM on December 5, 2024


is there evidence to suggest that phonics helps with these larger contextual problems? I want kids ot analyse a text more than i care if they spell.
posted by PinkMoose at 9:58 AM on December 5, 2024


Can't analyze if you can't read the words. Can't analyze if learning reading is made as frustrating as possible.
posted by sagc at 10:02 AM on December 5, 2024 [27 favorites]


...Non-phonetic words are less common in languages like Spanish. In order to become fluent in reading English kids really need teachers who can use a combination of methods.

I am seeing the evidence for this before my very eyes as my 1st grader is learning to read. He's in a Spanish immersion program that started with kindergarten. He's learning to read in Spanish because, for a lot of reasons better explained by people more familiar with the subject, it's easier to learn to read. Fewer non-phonetic words, something about the vowels sounds I can't quite remember.

What's wild is that those reading skills transfer directly to English so as his Spanish reading improves his English reading improves right along with it.

When I talk to people about Spanish immersion they always assume that it's about learning Spanish and being able to speak a 2nd language at near native levels of fluency. And yeah that is a benefit but the real benefits don't really have anything to do with the particular language, just the act of learning at least two languages has all kinds of learning and cognitive benefits.
posted by VTX at 10:02 AM on December 5, 2024 [11 favorites]


Pinkmoose-
The problem is that the act of reading is literally the process of decoding letters into sounds your brain recognizes - which you can only do by systematically treating a sentence like a line of input that you decode one letter at a time - the basics of phonics is to teach this process of decoding. You can't get to the larger contextual issues unless the story can be decoded from the page to the student's mind first.
posted by bookwo3107 at 10:03 AM on December 5, 2024 [15 favorites]


Hopefully I'm not commenting too much here, but I find this fascinating. At least with a foundation of phonics, a child can sound out the word and ask the teacher/parent "What does _____ mean?"

I don't know how the hell any kid could learn most words without being able to do this simple thing. The kid receives the answer "It means 'chimney' which is where the smoke goes up from a fire place" (or whatever). Then the kid can go back to that word and look at it and relate it to a fireplace, a house, Santa Claus, etc. Discuss what a chimney is more deeply with the parent.

How can you learn that without asking someone? Even if you had a picture of a house with a chimney, the kid might think it means "roof" or they might not know what a house with a chimney even is! The instructor can explain and give more context. The kid receives all that because they can sound out the word to ask a question. This is mind-bogglingly simple to me.

And of course this is the very first basics of reading, as we are discussing very basic, early learning techniques here. We aren't discussing sixth grade reading and interpretation of a short story. This is the basic building blocks of what makes up a short story or a news article, or anything.
posted by SoberHighland at 10:05 AM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]


> One of the problems with using phonics exclusively is that English words are often not spelled the way they are pronounced, they are non-phonetic. This is probably because English is a kind of conglomerate language with words that came from a variety of other languages. Non-phonetic words are less common in languages like Spanish.

Interestingly (according to a friend who worked on curriculum) the less regular spelling makes phonics more important to teach in English than in other languages. English does have rules that explain most words, they're just a lot more complicated to figure out. If your language has phonics rules that fit on a page, you don't need to tell kids that they exist, they figure it out from context. In English, new readers and even teachers and curriculum designers can miss how useful it is to learn the rules because they're less obvious.
posted by john hadron collider at 10:05 AM on December 5, 2024 [14 favorites]


If anything, mathematics should be looked at for ways to teach differently.

Math has tons of pedagogical fads, some of which I had a really bad time with when I was in school.
posted by atoxyl at 10:14 AM on December 5, 2024 [8 favorites]


@SoberHighland

I don't think being able to sound out the word (possibly incorrectly) is crucial to the process of learning unfamiliar words. If the kid is reading the word somewhere, then not knowing how to pronounce the word is probably not a significant barrier to asking for help to understand the word since they could show the written word to someone, or spell it, etc.
posted by Nec_variat_lux_fracta_colorem at 10:16 AM on December 5, 2024


One of my three basically barely needed us to point out that "letters represent speech sounds" and he was off to the races; one of them didn't read fluently until she was 9 or 10, despite lots of readalouds and reading practice and phonics-related stuff (we loved the Bob Books a lot). She can actually tell you what it was like, over the space of a week or so, for the words on pages to become intelligible, and she immediately became a voracious reader. I expected my early/easy reader to be the book nerd, but he is not.

I learned to read very much the way your daughter did. My school used phonics, and I did not grasp what they were doing whatsoever. I couldn’t recite the alphabet or so much as write my own name at the beginning of 3rd grade. But then one day as I was 'reading' the Classic Comics version of The Prisoner of Zenda, I head a strange voice in my head, which I at first thought was a radio someone had left on or someone talking outside a window. It took an embarrassingly long time, maybe half an hour, to realize the voice was some part of me saying the words in the page. After that, however, I was reading at grade level within a week and well beyond that in months. Toward the end of 4th grade I placed 2nd in the school wide spelling bee behind a 6th grader, and I also seemed to read much faster than the other kids.

But I’d say I also lost something by reading the way I did, because I think I was using so much of my visual processing ability in the act of reading that it was partially blocking the ability to visualize whatever was being described by the words on the page. One early manifestation of this was that when I was reading anything with an accompanying illustration, I literally (sic!) had to put one hand over the illustration or I couldn’t read the page at all.

Some really great writers, I am inclined to think those who can vividly describe scenes and actions, are notoriously terrible spellers — F Scott Fitzgerald for example — and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
posted by jamjam at 10:19 AM on December 5, 2024 [8 favorites]


but people who don't have the resources to move their kids to private school or pay for year-round tutors also don't have the resources to sue

I do wonder a little if this case isn't part of the "public schools bad, moar private schools" social wedge?

At least it wasn't as bad as teaching the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), as happened in a couple of the schools in my area (Eastwood [now East Renfrewshire], near Glasgow, Scotland) up until about 1977. ITA (which still has its adherents) took a scorched-earth fundamentalist approach to phonics: teach an entirely new 40+ character phonetic alphabet.

Some problems ensued:
  • the kids who learned to read ITA couldn't read regular English books. They required remedial classes if they transferred to another school. Looking back, the horrid behaviour of my cohort at 8 years old towards the kids in remedial class would've given a South Park editor pause. One of the ITA-taught kids responded to the taunts fists first, and became the playground bully.
    (Fuck, I'm sorry for what you went through, John R. — wherever you are — I knew I was being a little shit to you.)
  • ITA was designed for Received Pronunciation, which was exactly unlike how we spoke as wee soo'siders on the borders of the North Ayrshire moor/farmland. ITA couldn't represent the rhotic (rolled) R that's a key feature of Scottish English, amongst others.
If anyone deserves a settlement, it's those who were subjected to ITA.
posted by scruss at 10:28 AM on December 5, 2024 [10 favorites]


I made this post because I'm a special educator and have taught kids how to read for decades. I have many thoughts but the most important one is this:

everybody learns differently and curriculum is ideally written to use as many modalities as possible.

Saying curriculum is data driven is a joke. It is nearly impossible to determine how well any intervention works because all students respond differently. You can't compare apples to phonics to whole language to Heggerty.

The idea of having children surrounded by lovely chairs and learning to read by being in literacy-rich environments is nice but not everyone learns to read that way.

Some kids need to tap letter sounds.
Some kids need endless repetition of phonological awareness.
Some kids need to write before they can read.
Some kids need to stare at page after page and suddenly it clicks.
Some kids need to sound it out.
Some kids need everything read to them.

All of which is a long way of say that every single reading teacher will tell you that there's no one way to teach reading, but as long as children go home to literacy-rich homes where they are read to, they WILL learn to read.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 10:41 AM on December 5, 2024 [26 favorites]


I have to say the current phonics outrage is such a pat podcast narrative that I’m inherently a little skeptical that this simple thing explains the whole problem with reading. Partly it’s just - didn’t we already do this? I thought my cohort was when whole language had peaked and was starting to go out the first time. And I know people who have taught reading and I’m pretty sure they’d say phonics has been back for a while. But I also understand that education is so localized that I can’t really make assumptions about how things work across the country.
posted by atoxyl at 10:42 AM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]


Math has tons of pedagogical fads

Yeah, you should see how they're teaching arithmatic in US public schools, these days - it's bewildering.
posted by Rash at 10:44 AM on December 5, 2024


Yeah, when our girl was in first grade it was all sight words and guessing things. We didn't sue, but we couldn't figure out how the hell she was supposed to learn from it. So we got a phonics book and we taught her to read. She's now well ahead of the norm for her class on the endless assessments they do.

Now she's in third grade, and my wife's latest, "Flames! Flames on the side of my face!" issue is that they absolutely refuse to teach them how to write cursive, although they keep saying that's in the curriculum for this year. I mean we're a good halfway through the year. It's going to take some practice. (My guess is they're soft pedaling cursive because how would you test it and generate that sweet, sweet data?) She really wants to learn it, so we've again got a book, and we've got my mom doing it when we go visit. So far so good. We're not homeschooling her by any means, but I think you have to be prepared to supplement what the schools are doing.
posted by Naberius at 11:01 AM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


The central problem of so-called progressive education (which could, at least conceptually, be kept cordoned off from progressive politics, or progressive thinking generally) is that it begins with the idea that learning should be "natural," that it should flow organically from the learner's interest. The model is always how children learn to speak: No one has to teach them; they pick it up from their environment out of their natural inclination to understand.

The problem is that some things you don't learn organically that way. The proof is that societies without spoken language are almost impossible to find, but oral societies without writing are common. If we learn to read and write, part of that work is unnatural and must be taught explicitly.

The whole "you are a reader, now sit in a comfy chair and believe," aspirational-cosplay aura in Calkins' work was rooted in that fallacy, that given the right staging all children will simply absorb literacy out of the environment. But many students simply are not curious about reading and writing, and just as many would be curious if they were shown a process and a method.
posted by argybarg at 11:07 AM on December 5, 2024 [20 favorites]


they absolutely refuse to teach them how to write cursive

So when the kids are taught to write the new way, is the old way "wrong"?

My handwriting was stuck for about 40 years in a tarpit half-way between ball-and-stick printing and "joined-up" italics. It looked awful, and even I couldn't read it. After I got an ADHD diagnosis, I realized I need ed to learn to write again with a present mind and none of the messy/lazy schoolboy shame, so I learned Getty-Dubay italics. I still can't write cursive, but I will happily fake a loopy scrawl if I know it's going to annoy someone.
posted by scruss at 11:15 AM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]


Many here are missing the point.

It's not about the relative merits of any approach, or that they all have some value, but that Calkins and her people specifically created, promoted, and sold her system as an alternative to phonics eduction. The system was sold to thousands of schools around the world as a replacement for early phonics education in the face of decades of criticism and copious evidence regarding the necessity of early phonics education and with a total lack of evidence that their system worked.

It was only in 2020 in the face of mounting pressure that they grudgingly admitted some need for phonics and 2022 when they openly embraced in a desperate attempt to stem the tide.

The point is these people are charlatans and frauds who knowingly sold a defective system that damaged generations of children.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:17 AM on December 5, 2024 [45 favorites]


I love this conversation and I really appreciate it because my 1st grader is struggling with reading and I don't know what to do. I had listened to the podcast over the summer and I was appalled that anyone could believe that children will learn to read by some kind of magical osmosis, some beautiful mysterious sacred process that can't be known. Anyhow, I was deeply worried that there would be no phonics in first grade but thank goodness they started the year with some Jolly Phonics materials.

Anyhow, I have thought about this often since I heard the podcast and I can only conclude that 'how people learn to read' is a really, really difficult thing to figure out. My mom says I taught myself to read. I was reading full chapter books in the 1st grade (like The Trumpeter Swan, omg what was my mom thinking?). But I really think Sesame Street had a lot to do with it.
posted by kitcat at 11:35 AM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]


I totally agree that phonics should the fundamental basis of early reading instruction -- and I teach about this in my own courses whenever the opportunity comes up -- but I also want to note that many educators also believe that the "Sold a Story" podcast misrepresents the issues in ways that favor the "privatize all the schools, destroy public education" agenda. One example would be this blog post by Nancy E. Bailey, and more criticism can be found in the book The Broken Logic of "Sold a Story": A Personal Response to "The Science of Reading" by Thomas Newkirk; and in the ILEC response also. Harsher criticism of Hanford comes from Dr. P. L. Thomas as well. Hanford is not necessarily wrong, but she is a journalist, and not an expert, with her own narrative to push.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 11:41 AM on December 5, 2024 [9 favorites]


Most kids need some phonics. I needed phonics and learned phonics in kindergarten. My son learned to read on his own and enjoyed leveling up on the Fountas Pinnell reading levels (sort of like a game-ifcation of reading) and read chapter books in kindergarten. However, I noticed he just has a really great memory for sight words and was not actually sounding anything out. Cue back to phonics. Even if your child is reading at or above grade level naturally, they may fall out of their depth in later school years without phonics. However, it is important to grow a love of reading as well which a straight phonics program sometimes fails to do. I really wish our country would let good teachers teach what they think is right instead of dictating curriculum (looking at you, NYC).

Incidentally, I think this sort of horrified fingerpointing will happen with math. Math is taught so terribly in elementary school - it sucks for the kids and sucks for the teachers. I think some elementary teachers are legit terrified of teaching math. In my opinion, there are to be a variety of instructions methods for different kids based on where they are. Some kids have great number sense and understand decomposing and arrays and all that fun stuff in K and 1st. Other kids just need to memorize their sums and do rote math until their brains are at a place to absorb number theory. Current curriculums do not allow for this variety - they really want to teach that number theory early on to every child regardless of where their brains are. Some kids learn to walk at 9 months and other kids walk at 16 months - let's allow our kids the flexibility to do the same with academics.
posted by ichimunki at 11:49 AM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]


The idea that public schools having a problem with reading curricula means that they should be destroyed in favor of private schoooling is just another version of the right saying "govt is awful so should be destroyed. Elect me and I'll show you how incompetently I can govern".
Which is to say: it's good to be aware that these problems are being used opportunistically by the enemies of public education, but that is no reason to pretend it's not a problem or shrink away from criticizing what really seems to be a handful of very bad actors. Speaking of which, does anyone know Calkins' political views?
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:59 AM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


I also want to note that many educators also believe that the "Sold a Story" podcast misrepresents the issues in ways that favor the "privatize all the schools, destroy public education" agenda.

I have listened to the entire podcast and also read some articles Hanford wrote earlier -- and I did not come away with the idea that she was promoting privatizing at all. (I would have noticed if her emphasis was on privatization; I'm not really in favour of existing private schools, let alone creating more).

What she identifies as a problem is the opposite: the private companies that make money selling questionable curriculum materials have too much influence in education.

--------- ---------

I have so many feelings about this topic. My mother spent years working in children's literacy (and, being middle school aged, that meant I was voluntold to help out, too) - their program was based around the idea that reading should be fun and cozy and encouraged reading by being read to and reading in groups - but it was meant to supplement school, not replace it. I also met kids who had never been taught to read and who limped on by guessing based on the pictures; my mom was helping them learn how to sound out the words.

Listening to the podcast, I was aghast when they got to the cueing system. How could anyone have possibly every thought that was a good idea? Looking at the pictures? The point of learning to read is that - eventually! - everyone needs to be able to read text without pictures.

I was so appalled at the description of balanced literacy that I was ready to run out and grab the nearest teacher to beg them to tell me that this is not what was happening in our local schools in Ontario.

Unfortunately, it was - and still is? I don't know if it's stopped, but the ineffectiveness of these methods led to a recent human rights inquiry and report that finds that the emphasis on "balanced literacy" and cueing systems has undermined the rights of children to an equal and effective education:

From the Executive Summary:
If classroom instruction is based on an evidence-based core curriculum, most students (80–90%) will learn to read words accurately and efficiently, and few students will need more intensive instruction or intervention. Decades of multidisciplinary research has shown that the best way to teach all students to read words is through direct, explicit, systematic instruction in foundational word-reading skills. Beginning in Kindergarten, this includes explicit instruction in phonemic awareness [the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (or phonemes) in spoken words], phonics (which teaches letter-sound associations, also known as grapheme-phoneme correspondences and using these to “sound-out” words and to spell words). From about Grade 2, explicit instruction focuses on more advanced knowledge and skills, such as increased study of word structures and patterns (for example prefixes, word roots and suffixes), and how word spellings relate to one another. From beginning to teach these decoding skills, students also practice reading words in stories to build word-reading accuracy and speed.

Unfortunately, the current Ontario Curriculum, Language, Grades 1–8, 2006 (Ontario Language curriculum) and teacher education in Ontario’s faculties does not promote these highly effective approaches to early word-reading instruction. Instead, with few exceptions, the main approaches in Ontario are teaching word-solving skills with the three-cueing system and balanced literacy. The three-cueing system encourages students to guess or predict words using cues or clues from the context and their prior knowledge. In balanced literacy (or comprehensive balanced literacy), teachers “gradually release responsibility” by first modelling text reading, sharing text reading, then guiding students’ text reading, with the eventual goal of the student reading texts independently. These approaches for word reading are rooted in a whole language philosophy which suggests that by immersing children in spoken and written language, they will discover how to read. Given this philosophy, many of the other important literacy outcomes beyond word-reading skills may also not receive adequate explicit, evidence-based instruction.

With few small exceptions, Ontario students are not being taught foundational word-reading skills using an explicit and systematic approach to teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding and word reading fluency. Even where boards or teachers are trying to be more intentional about using direct, systematic instruction, they are constrained by the current Ontario curriculum and emphasis on cueing systems and balanced literacy."
(emphasis added)

So my reaction to the story of this lawsuit is: Good. Please take them to the cleaners.
posted by jb at 12:14 PM on December 5, 2024 [12 favorites]


Learning to read with phonics led me to confidently talk about shifting paradeegems as a college freshman.

I have no regrets.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 12:21 PM on December 5, 2024 [16 favorites]


I always thought things like "picture cues," mentioned in the article, were bullshit. A picture accompanying even a short piece of text can be so ambiguous, or offer so many hints, that trying to use it to predict text strikes me as prima facie near-useless.

It's not just that pictures may be deceptive - but the ultimate goal in teaching reading is a reader who understands text with no pictures. I know I was reluctant to switch from picture to chapter books even when I was ready, but at least I had the ability to do so by sounding out words, and then quickly went from books with occasional pictures to ones with no pictures at all. As adults, we all have to work all the time with text with no images.

Interestingly (according to a friend who worked on curriculum) the less regular spelling makes phonics more important to teach in English than in other languages. English does have rules that explain most words, they're just a lot more complicated to figure out.

Fascinating! I have been, anecdotally, noticing this myself - how a "c" mostly only makes an "s" sound when before front vowels like "ee" (ceiling), but not before back vowels (cat, cot); the soft and hard g's have a similar pattern. (I believe most of these are thanks to phonetic changes in French as it developed out of Latin). I now also have a toddler and thus "C is for Cat" and "C is for Cookie" and "C is for Celestial" are much more relevant than they have been in the past.

I'm not a teacher, but I have done study on the history of the English language. The phonetic messiness of English has two main sources: spelling standardization began just before and continued on through some massive language shifts from middle to modern English, and we love to borrow words from other languages and just keep their orthography -- or, in the case of something like lieutenant ("leftenant" in most places other than the US), we borrowed the orthography without even keeping the pronunciation. These two habits have gifted us all those terrible things like "ght" (originally fully sounded), "ph" (from Greek, where it is similar to, but not the same as "f"), and the "g" in "rouge" which gets pronounced with a French sound (zh) - and which is over extended into other non-English words (like "Beijing", which really should have a harder "j" sound, but is often slurred by Anglophones into "Beizhing").

Overall, of course phonics is not the end of literacy teaching. When it comes to the next steps, it's important (as in my quote above) to have "increased study of word structures and patterns (for example prefixes, word roots and suffixes), and how word spellings relate to one another" - and lots of lots of practice to improve the speed and fluency of reading until it does become unconscious. But phonics is the first step - the first key in an alphabetic system. Without a strong basing in phonics, the foundation for the next bits just isn't there.

Speaking of phonics being at the base: when typing quickly, sometimes I just type phonetically (e.g., spead for speed). Fluent readers are sounding out words - just really really quickly.
posted by jb at 12:40 PM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]



I have to say the current phonics outrage is such a pat podcast narrative that I’m inherently a little skeptical that this simple thing explains the whole problem with reading.


It is so difficult not to doubt yourself when you see right wing talking heads agreeing with you on an issue. I'm Mefi's resident conservative (yes, really) and every time I hear one of these people concur with me about something I have to reëvaluate my thinking.

And it's because even when they're aligned with you about an issue, they're still misusing it for something else. We can talk about Calkins because she sucks. They talk about her because she's a useful cudgel for busting teacher unions.

Native Hebrew speaker her. Hebrew orthography is not diverged from pronunciation the way it is in English. The idea of learning to read with anything besides phonics just baffles me.
posted by ocschwar at 12:43 PM on December 5, 2024 [6 favorites]


Some kids have an appetite for a little more stimulation, and phonics (naively taught) might seem boring to them. But amusement can be created very cheaply. If you have a kid, let them pick random jumbles of letters out of a hat and line them up as if they were a legit word. My kids thought it was hilarious when I would move my finger across those jumbles of letters exactly as if I were reading to them, pronouncing the jumble as if it were a word. "Blurphx".
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 12:44 PM on December 5, 2024 [9 favorites]


Looks like Gen Xers were mostly out of school by the time this rolled around. Millennials and Gen Z got screwed by it, though.

These women got rich and famous, relatively speaking anyway, for a really flawed system. I hope they lose and have to pay a lot of money. And that money should go to phonics programs across the country.
posted by zardoz at 12:49 PM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]


Some kids have an appetite for a little more stimulation, and phonics (naively taught) might seem boring to them.

The tutoring program I volunteered at in the US had fun video games that taught phonics; the kids loved playing them and did learn letter-sound associations.

How does phonics help with larger problems of contextual reading---how does phonics help with the social context of a text? Like being able to read words is fine, but doesn't whole language allow for this kind of wholistic understanding?

That comes after. But it's impossible to start thinking about the social context of a cat on a mat, if you can't decode "cat" and "mat" and turn them into words.

The whole language approach as an addition to phonics is terrific; that's basically what my mother's literacy program was concentrating on (reading to kids to expand their spoken vocabularies as well as creating environments where reading was considered fun and rewarding for its own sake). But going at it without the phonics would be like teaching piano by just getting kids to listen to music and try to replicate it -- which will totally work for some people, like Tori Amos, but the rest of us need to learn what the keys are.

All the sensible advice works phonetics in early, while not ignoring the whole language side: we read to kids (teaches wholistic stuff, treats books as a fun thing), then teach kids the sounds of letters (phonics), then teach kids how to fit the graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds of their language) starting with the simplest examples, work up to more complicated examples (e.g., "-sion"), keep practicing, practicing, practicing - and eventually (maybe in university) teach them some Latin so that they can have fun with etymology (like always knowing when to use "i.e." versus "e.g." because "i.e." means "id est" (that is)). But - as noted above and in all of the research, reading cannot be taught just by exposure to most people, not like spoken or signed languages. Text decoding is a conscious human skill, not part of our natural abilities.

What I really want to know now is: who has studied the acquisition of literacy in an ideographic system like Chinese and how is that different? (Yes, I know it's only partly ideographic and characters do also correspond to syllables, but it's still not at all like an alphabetic system).
posted by jb at 12:57 PM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


is there evidence to suggest that phonics helps with these larger contextual problems? I want kids ot analyse a text more than i care if they spell.

Basic phonics isn't about being able to spell correctly. It's about being able to decode letters and translate them into sounds in your head. I mispell things all the time, but I can still sound them out well.

We all are doing that constantly (if we are on this website). In fact, wii ken al doo it eevin wen thengs arnt speld corrukly. (But writing phonetically is hard when we have different dialects).

Speaking of words with crazy spellings: I spent I don't know how long thinking that the lands of a manorial lord were called the "de-mes-ne". It's spelled demesne, but pronounced "demain". It didn't affect my understanding of the word at all, but it was funny. Similarly, to this day I struggle to pronounce "diocese", but I have written academic things using that word repeatedly.
posted by jb at 1:06 PM on December 5, 2024 [7 favorites]


I greatly enjoyed Spell It Out, by David Crystal for connecting me directly to real and hypothesized people in the last thousand years who did their best to shape and write English in response to their immediate situations and, in doing so, left us the beautiful mess we have now.
The monks also seem to have had a problem over how to write down the sound of /w/, as in we. This sound had once been used in Latin, spelled with a V, but by the 7th century this letter was being pronounced with a /v/ sound. That didn’t seem to bother some scribes, especially in the north of England, who began spelling the English /w/ with a u – the form of V used as a small letter in cursive writing. Others must have found this to be confusing, because they opted for a uu ('double u') instead. But most scribes, especially in the south of England, can’t have been convinced by either of these choices,because we soon find them going down a different path – using a new letter, taken (once again) from the runic alphabet. They chose the rune named ‘wyn’, meaning ‘joy’ – р – and this became the commonest usage throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. (It died out in the 13th century, when the ‘double u’, now joined together as a single letter w, became the norm.)
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 1:26 PM on December 5, 2024 [10 favorites]


Thankfully my kids teachers (20+ years experience) were all “ok we’re supposed to teach it like this… but we are going to teach phonics too because we find it helps”

Same with math “we don’t memorize” BUT “here are some facts tables to review and study sheets and flash cards and there’s a test next week” wink wink
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:33 PM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]


I remember sitting in my prep or 1st grade classroom in 1968 or 69 (same room) learning phonics by rote, just like I learned times tables. Sure it was a little boring, but the group activity of it, the chorus of voices reciting what was now becoming known to us, was kind of fun and relaxing in itself. I was particularly fascinated by the witchy powers of the letter 'e' as a last letter in a word and what it could do to the sound of earlier vowels.

I am a late-career English teacher of disengaged older students. I was never taught how to teach reading because I would not have students at that young stage. But I see many students unable to guess at words in context because they have no decoding skills to aid them and it's far too late to run a class-room chorus of a ee i o you.
posted by Thella at 1:42 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


In biology, we've all agreed to call organisms by scientific names that are all made up. I tell students since the names are made up, there's not really a "right way" to say them. There are some consistent pronunciation quirks, but people who speak different languages have different quirks, and even within English, you often hear very different scientific name pronunciations from different dialects (I took entomology from a guy from Alabama and population ecology from a Brit).

I tell my students to sound out scientific names for themselves and be confident because there is no "wrong". Most of them, unfortunately, don't know how to sound a word out. So they'll just guess a word that starts with the same few letters, because that's what they were taught to do, even thought the word bears no resemblance to the scientific name. For presentations, where they actually want to get it "right", usually what they do is go on YouTube and find a video that uses the scientific name and memorize how it's said in the video. Which is fine. But a lot more work than just knowing how to sound out words.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:43 PM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


Oh, I also meant to say, my students who are native Spanish speakers have no problem sounding words out, and for that I am always grateful.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:44 PM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


Reminder:

English is pretty much what happens when German and French get together and have a baby who can't spell. And then they're always like, why can't you be more like your nice cousin Dutch, and English says, you two are never proud of me, I'm the official language of more then 60 sovereign states and one of the most commonly spoken second languages in the world, Dutch is spoken in, what, the Netherlands and parts of Belgium and Suriname? And then French says, don't you brag to me about being a lingua franca, young lady, they named the term lingua franca after me, and English is like, I'm not a lady, for the last time, I've dropped grammatical gender, and German says, not in my language family you haven't, I know you have modern ideas but there are rules. To hell with your rules, English says, what did they ever get me but weak and strong conjugation classes, and French interrupts and says well maybe you'd have a more coherent grammatical system if you weren't whoring around with every language that flutters its eyelashes at you, don't think I don't know what you've been doing with Spanish lately. And English says, oh, because you're such a pure language? That's rich. And German says, don't you talk about your parent language that way, but English keeps going, English goes one step too far and says, French wouldn't even be around if Latin hadn't taken Gallic and -- Whack! German slaps English across the face! French is crying and can't stop, and English storms off yelling, and German wants to console French but doesn't know how, they've always been just across a border but worlds apart, back in the Old Franconian days they seemed to have so much in common, but French has changed so much and German can't speak the language of Romance ...
posted by Mayor West at 2:07 PM on December 5, 2024 [31 favorites]


inglich is a tragediegh
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:19 PM on December 5, 2024


Phonics is not just "sounding out" words but the systematic teaching of progressively harder and more complex word types-- the details depend on the phonics system, but the one I learned starts with short a and e and a few common consonants (e.g., cat, mad, bet, led) and continues through the short vowels, then long ones, then... etc. The students are reading controlled texts for a long while. It's not "natural" but as we know, reading isn't natural. It is not something our brains evolved to do.

I read somewhere-- don't know if this is 100% true-- that students learning other languages (besides English) do not compete in spelling bees. That there's no need for contests to teach spelling because it's obvious how a word is spelled if you hear it pronounced. My second language skills are weak, but from what I know of German spelling and pronunciation, that is true. If we were to standardize English spelling, it would help a great deal, but I suppose it's too late for that.
posted by tuesdayschild at 2:33 PM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]


People can be well meaning but wrong, and can try to make money off their well meaning but wrong ideas.
posted by OnceUponATime at 2:36 PM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]


I've been out of the game for about four years but literacy was my focus at work (high school English- being year 7-12 in Australia). We were dealing with kids who really, really struggled to read, and then struggled across all their classes because after about grade 3 there is no more explicit reading instruction and reading is also the way you are expected to learn new stuff.

I'm a little surprised to see Fountas and Pinnell here, as they were touted as a way we could help our strugglers.

Personally, I remember letter of the week at kinder- my parents showed me how the carrot could be rehydrated after a week at Kinder (and then wouldn't let me eat it because they hadn't used filtered water and we were overseas- the outrage set the memory!). Then prep in Australia I don't remember much reading at all. It must have been a lot of whole language. Then after a year we came back to the overseas posting and I was in grade 1 and floundering with the reading. (A factor in my education was shifting from Australian calendar Jan-Dec to American system Aug-Jun) I remember reading recovery lessons, reading out mot-her instead of mother, and then the moment in grade 2 where it was like the words sped up on the page and zipped along as I was reading fluently, eventually so fast I could see the story in my head instead of the words on the page. Looking back I think phonics saved me.

Politically as an educator, phonics was always supported by the right (and like a stopped clock...) and seemed to be associated with standardized testing, budget cuts and worksheets instead of the joy of reading. We resisted that evil and threw out the baby with the bath water, and it turns out you can't love reading if you can't read.
posted by freethefeet at 2:37 PM on December 5, 2024 [7 favorites]


I’ve heard Polish all my life but never learned how to read it. Then in adulthood I actually spent time memorizing the letters-sounds mapping.
Imagine my shock and surprise at like instantly being able to read Polish. It was stunning. Even “Can I buy a vowel” words like Szczęście are easy (ish).
So ya phonics all the way
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:38 PM on December 5, 2024 [6 favorites]


It is so difficult not to doubt yourself when you see right wing talking heads agreeing with you on an issue. I'm Mefi's resident conservative (yes, really) and every time I hear one of these people concur with me about something I have to reëvaluate my thinking.

I have no trouble admitting that education is one of the areas in which I’m most conservative, not in the sense that I think it should be privatized but in the sense that I think a lot of well-intentioned reformist ideas about how it should be done are full of shit. Because I was a kid, once, and they were full of shit when I was a kid. My skepticism of the current movement is more about resistance to simplistic narrativizing and simple prescriptions for complicated problems, especially since I have some exposure to the history through my mom who used to teach reading. Who sure as shit taught phonics, though working with ESL learners and kids who are struggling in particular I imagine there was less controversy about that.

Also while I am pretty solidly in favor of emphasizing phonics to the extent that it has actually been de-emphasized, I have a sense that “cognitive neuroscience of reading” people might be putting on airs just a little bit about how rigorous and well-established their field is…
posted by atoxyl at 2:50 PM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


Also I feel like being “one size fits all” is something bad ideas in education have in common, from the “progressive” side to the “traditionalist” side.
posted by atoxyl at 2:55 PM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]


Math has tons of pedagogical fads, some of which I had a really bad time with when I was in school.

Coming full circle to this, in my day it was a popular idea that kids should be allowed to figure out math through “hands-on” activity, arranging blocks and cutting paper, instead of being rigidly instructed on algorithms and principles. As a kid who was good at picking up explained algorithms and principles but lagging in motor skills, this did not help me feel the joy of mathematics, I’ll tell you that.
posted by atoxyl at 3:08 PM on December 5, 2024 [4 favorites]


Decades later I am still mad at the “bean counter” lesson to be had to do grouping little cups of 10 beans and then breaking them down for weeks when I figure out how to write out carrying the one On the first day.

My district seems to use Heggerty phonics and both my kids pickup up reading really quickly. But we come from a highly literate household and have been reading multiple books nightly since the day they were born…
posted by CostcoCultist at 3:22 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


What I really want to know now is: who has studied the acquisition of literacy in an ideographic system like Chinese and how is that different

I wonder about that also, jb. Seems like this 'whole language' is identical to how Japanese- and especially Chinese-language learners learn their kanjii and hanzi, so this teaching approach would benefit by adding/adapting East Asian teaching techniques; but I never hear about other languages in these discussions. Xenophobic Americans ignorant of cultures other than their own, etc.
posted by Rash at 3:24 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


But we come from a highly literate household and have been reading multiple books nightly since the day they were born

Just a reminder that you can be those things and do those things, but still have a kid who struggles with reading because of a learning difference, dyslexia, ADHD - probably lots of other things too.
posted by kitcat at 4:47 PM on December 5, 2024 [7 favorites]


it was a popular idea that kids should be allowed to figure out math through “hands-on” activity, arranging blocks and cutting paper

I don't think there's anything wrong with this necessarily, but at some point, asking kids to rediscover all of mathematics from first principles runs into scaling problems. As in, the kid'll be dead before she finishes. I remember a period of math learning which was the other way around too, doing a bunch of arithmetic and later trig problems and integrals by rote, because there's value in being able to turn the crank and get results out without having constructed the machine yourself, so to speak. Later you can specialize and learn about the principles of machine-building (I in fact did this, studying math in college).

Much like language learning, I suspect a mixed-technique approach is probably better than trying to get a class of kids to all march to the same drum.
posted by axiom at 4:54 PM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]


I learned about the importance of phonics in graduate school 20 years ago this year. It took all of that time for my professor’s expertise on this to penetrate the state standards for teaching, not for lack of trying. It is hard not to feel despair when I think about that. Twenty years of effort to establish a fact that was already known, to which people were resistant, continue to be resistant, for largely political reasons.
posted by eirias at 5:13 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


ITA was designed for Received Pronunciation, which was exactly unlike how we spoke as wee soo'siders on the borders of the North Ayrshire moor/farmland. ITA couldn't represent the rhotic (rolled) R that's a key feature of Scottish English, amongst others.

I'm from way out in the sticks in Denmark, originally. A little island with a distinctive dialect, substantially different from standard Danish in both pronunciation, and some fundamental grammar (standard Danish has suffix definitive article declaration, dialect effectively has a word for 'the' for example). My mum still recalls when phonics curricula were rolled out in her youth. Teachers proudly stood at the front of the class, exciting lines that would've made sense in standard Danish ("j e g says 'yai'" makes sense - soft j, soft g) but absolutely did not in dialect ("j e g says 'ah'", the equivalent dialect word). It'd be like a Scottish teacher trying to take the class through a phonics lesson sounding out c h i l d to get "bairn".
posted by Dysk at 5:58 PM on December 5, 2024 [5 favorites]


I remember a period of math learning which was the other way around too, doing a bunch of arithmetic and later trig problems and integrals by rote

Integrals not so much, but for most of the 20th Century there was money to be made fresh out of high school if you could do trig and logarithms by rote. Junior draftsmen, surveyor's assistants, merchant sailors all had a use for those skills. That curriculum is there in 11th grade for (outdated) vocational purposes.

And people in other professions have their own reasons for having to know stuff by rote. A year and a half of medical school is just about nothing else. I code for a living and I right now spend a lot of time cluing in younger co-workers about Unix idiosyncrasies that don't have to exist, and which were written before the co-workers were born. Learning by rote is part of life.
posted by ocschwar at 6:44 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


integrals by rote

A good example of where you pretty much have to know the building blocks and techniques by rote so you can put them together to do more complex problems.
posted by atoxyl at 6:56 PM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]


Not really on topic, but the comments about the importance of developing the ability to read without accompanying pictures reminded me of something my daughter said when she was about 8 years old.
While visiting a friend of mine, she heard the mother encourage reading by offering her child a set amount of TV time for every completed chapter. On our way home, she mused, "I don't understand why anyone would like TV more than reading. When you're reading, you can make up the pictures in your head."
posted by Scout405 at 9:30 PM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]


> The problem is that the act of reading is literally the process of decoding letters into sounds your brain recognizes

No, that is one way. To be explicit, I have read books and not known I could not pronounce words in the book: I read (and understood) the book without decoding sounds.

This is not a discounting of phonics based education. Just be aware that people's brains work differently: you can read and parse Englsh without the audio processing part of your brain being involved. Or some people can.
posted by NotAYakk at 9:44 PM on December 5, 2024 [10 favorites]


I have no trouble admitting that education is one of the areas in which I’m most conservative, not in the sense that I think it should be privatized but in the sense that I think a lot of well-intentioned reformist ideas about how it should be done are full of shit.

This is the small-c conservative idea I take most seriously: that the scope of the adoption of an idea (in the sense of putting that idea into practice) should be related to the amount of evidence for that idea. This is very much not how fads work, of course.

Some practices are expected to work better when more people do them (like joining a specific social network, or attempting to leave a virus's social network by getting vaccinated). Those practices reward "coordination" (in the game-theoretic sense of "multiple players performing the same action"). But it doesn't seem like "teach reading in this new way" is something with that kind of promised benefit. Instead, adopting newfangled educational strategies or policies on a massive scale introduces correlated risk if those strategies don't pay off (and here, they didn't). When taking a risk like that, it would be good to have a "hedging buddy" that will do the opposite of what you do; if the course taken by one of you is a disaster, at least the other will not suffer that same fate.

Yes, it seems bizarre to enter into a "hedging buddy" arrangement. It's not something people or organizations seem likely to do on their own. But it seems like it could have benefits when trying out potentially beneficial- but risky- strategies.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 10:40 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]


integrals by rote

A good example of where you pretty much have to know the building blocks and techniques by rote so you can put them together to do more complex problems.


Very much no. Which isn’t to say that first learning algorithmic steps without understanding isn’t effective for anyone. Students’ past training and received attitudes toward math can have a significant impact on this by the time they reach the stage where they would be learning calculus, too - we all learn “how to learn” throughout our formal and informal educations, and students who have only ever experienced one method may not have the flexibility to adapt well to other methods. I’ll refer you to my comments in past threads on math education for more details, though, so as to not derail this thread.

I do find the comparisons between phonics or whole language and number sense interesting. Not having expertise in literacy education, I don’t know how they really compare. But on the math side: with numbers, knowing what the numerals (0-10) mean is one thing. Understanding base-ten structure in terms of how these digits combine to make multi-digit numbers is a second, separate thing (and important for avoiding many of the common errors that students make when learning and performing the standard arithmetic algorithms). Having a conceptual understanding of the arithmetic operations, on the other hand, is more important than rote fluency with algorithms for helping students avoid the many common errors or sticking points at the next levels of math (working with fractions, factoring). Meanwhile, there’s a lot of evidence for the importance of number sense in later mathematical fluency - but number sense is maybe most closely comparable to reading whole words. It involves being able to look at a number and use estimation (which requires understanding of base-ten structure, which requires understanding of digits/numerals including the order relations (which is bigger/smaller) between them) to have a sense of the number as a whole quantity, not just a string of unrelated digits that each have to be parsed individually.

Fluency with algorithms or recall of “math facts” helps many of us not have to try to hold too many details at once in our working memory when trying to puzzle out new mathematical ideas or solve problems, of course (though as I gain more experience with students with a wider variety of learning differences, I can now see some helpful work-arounds as well). But a lot of traditional math education assumes that all students will somehow develop the right mental models/understandings if they do enough rote computations, which is contraindicated by over a century of modern evidence. (The reason the cashier can’t mentally compute your change isn’t because they don’t know the standard addition and subtraction algorithms, it’s because they haven’t magically intuited base ten structure despite not being explicitly taught about it. - we use a variety of different, context-dependent strategies for mental math computations if we're doing them with any sort of efficiency and proficiency. And a lot of the “new math” arithmetic that folks tend to complain about on the internet is attempting to teach that toolbox of computational strategies.)

Long story short, there’s different levels and types of knowledge and understanding interacting and working together to produce mathematical fluency or numeracy. And the order of steps that best helps us to develop numeracy can vary by student.
posted by eviemath at 3:37 AM on December 6, 2024 [6 favorites]


The phonics focus on literacy confuses me - if phonics is how children learn to read, how do Deaf people learn to read? It would seem to me, there is perhaps more than one way for humans to learn how to read?

Also, phonics-enthusiasts, how can you read the word Worcester (pronounced Woo-ster), the names Siobhan (pronounced Shavahn) or Sean (pronounced Shawn) or words pronounced differently depending on the person Data, Tomato, Potato, Interesting, Vase.....and so on?
posted by Toddles at 4:05 AM on December 6, 2024 [4 favorites]


I homeschooled three kids who learned to read between, oh, 2005-2013. When my kids were little, "balanced literacy" and the like were very big among homeschoolers, but it always seemed to me like it was an example of taking as a model the way kids who are naturally gifted at reading, and trying to get all kids to learn to read that way

That has always been my criticism of it as well, and it's also my wider criticism of constructivist approaches to education in general.

In both cases, they rest on very real observations about how precocious or elite performers learn and/or how advanced knowledge is acquired and just assume that this must also be the best way to teach fundamental knowledge to much younger children.

I actually learned to read in two languages (English and Dutch, and there are some interesting theoretical differences between them from the POV of encoding complexity that seem to have an effect on learning to read) and did it without being explicitly taught to sound out words, just from parents reading to me a lot and pointing to words.

In Dutch reading education, we use a tiered system that puts words into categories based on their patterns. So the lowest level has consonant-single vowel, then the next is CVC etc. I know that is also how English early readers are structured but the difference is how deep you can go into Dutch before you would have to memorise exceptions to the standard phonology. In English it is way harder to structure upper-beginner texts to avoid exception words without making the text quite artificial. Interestingly, Danish has high phonemic depth (complexity of sound encoding) like English... guess what? Danish children also struggle to learn to read.

However that probably doesn't work for everyone and it certainly requires parents who will not only model reading but also spend many hours intensively reading to their children.

Similarly the logic for constructivism in education often seems to be based on people's own memories of how they learned complex and advanced topics. I certainly know that while lectures were important, the moments where I really "learned" complex analysis as a university student were solitary or in small groups, turning ideas over in our heads over and over again. Certainly when I started doing actual research of my own, that was something that was done alone or in small groups intensively thinking about things.

So it seems really natural then to think that if you're teaching a group of average 12 year olds geography that they should be "constructing" the knowledge themselves or in small groups, with guided prompts.

The problem is with the real world evidence, what actually happens is this:
-Weaker students just don't do it at all or try and don't get very far
-The stronger students learn from this process but would probably learn from any process
-Weaker students will just learn what they can from the stronger students in the group... but at that point *they* are not constructing their own knowledge, they're just getting mixed quality ad-hoc peer teaching.

There is a really strange political angle here as well, where a bunch of spirit of '68 hangovers seem to have gotten it into their minds that structured teaching is authoritarian and sort of a discreditable quasi-fascist enterprise and that the more "free" they can make education, the better society they will build. What they've actually done is deprived poor kids of being able to read.

I note that the Soviet Union and other actually socialist-aspiring countries were actually extremely conservative in terms of educational technique and didn't convince themselves that the way to lift up the masses was by not teaching them to read.

Also, to add: this is also an example (and a lot of homeschool curricula back in the day had this problem) of building a curriculum based on a theory you have created about how children learn, not based on observation or study of what children actually do when learning, or how the activities a child does relate to outcomes.


Yes, it is really striking how much pedagogical theory is entirely abstracted from any kind of attempt to ground in neurological underpinning of what we know about how brains work or backed by empirical evidence. To be fair, it is actually really hard to do comparative studies of education because of the massive home-environment and genetic confounders.

There's another example here, which is from a discussion I was privy to between a few teachers of history and geography last year.

The topic was the utility of "rote" memorising of dates and places. This is rather out of fashion of course, but everyone around the table agreed that what was really important was understanding the relationships between events. Memorising dates just seems wrong. It has the stink of stern schoolmasters smacking hands with rulers about it.

Except though... if you want to understand the relationships between two events in time, it helps that time is a one dimensional space and actually if you know the dates of the two events then you know the relationship between two events in time! Then when you learn a new thing about, say, the Franco-Prussian war you can immediately place that relative to Napoleon, World War I, the American Civil War, and whatever other events might help you anchor it into a particular context.

Similarly, it really helps to know where France and Prussia are and where those are relative to other events happening at a similar time.

Without that, the new knowledge has nowhere to sit in your brain, it's not going to be well integrated, and there will be no way for you to engage in the higher level activities of understanding or connecting it to the modern world.
posted by atrazine at 4:34 AM on December 6, 2024 [11 favorites]


OG phonics kid here. Phonics was the big, new shiny when I went through grade school, wayyy back in the 60s. Those lessons have held me in good stead over the umpteen decades, and I cannot imagine a curriculum without a solid base in phonics. It would be like trying to learn math without knowing what “2” was.

...that's the typical complaint with phonics in learning to read - it's boring.

I think this has far more to do with a culture that increasingly demands to be entertained rather than seek. Encountering a new word and phonetically sussing it has always been a fun challenge to me. Reaching into those deep-seated skills, like a super-power. YMMV, I suppose.

Hop On Pop FTW.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:23 AM on December 6, 2024 [4 favorites]


I think the problem is that everyone learns differently; some kids need phonics, and some not only don’t but actively thrive without it. I learned to read largely through being read to, whole-word reading, and being exposed to books. Some kids *do* find reading natural, especially if their parents read for pleasure. I was reading chapter books before I hit kindergarten, and to this day I can still read faster than almost anyone else I know, because I can read far faster than I can speak. It is incredibly helpful now that I’m in law school- I can also locate sections on a page far faster than many of my peers. I also asked my kid - her understanding as well as my own is that her experience was very similar.

The real problem in my estimation is that we are required to have classes that smash everyone together, rather than placing the more advanced readers together and placing those who need phonics together. I personally would have found phonics instruction in school *torturous*, and I’m deeply grateful that I still went to school at a time when they separated kids by reading level and let me just read books by myself and talk about them.
posted by corb at 6:15 AM on December 6, 2024 [4 favorites]


Also, phonics-enthusiasts, how can you read the word Worcester (pronounced Woo-ster), the names Siobhan (pronounced Shavahn) or Sean (pronounced Shawn) or words pronounced differently depending on the person Data, Tomato, Potato, Interesting, Vase.....and so on?

Well, I mean you potentially learn to pronounce the majority (or perhaps a low plurality) of words and then you have to memorize the rest. People don't like to admit that about math or English - that people basically have to memorize a whole bunch of it. Sure the rules about how to multiply single digit numbers or phonics apply - but it's really just something you memorized - you don't phonics out every word or multiply every number past primary school.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:17 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]


The phonics focus on literacy confuses me - if phonics is how children learn to read, how do Deaf people learn to read? It would seem to me, there is perhaps more than one way for humans to learn how to read?

One can think of text as a direct encoding of some semantic content, but practically, most words' spellings are- or were at one point- derived from their pronunciation in some way. The regularities in those derivations give readers a chance to relate written words to words they have heard, because most readers have a large inventory of words that they've heard and understand that they can leverage as they come to develop their understanding of the written word.

That is not to say that phonics is strictly necessary, because Deaf people do learn to read. But it's an extremely useful tool. The regularities are there, and for people with typical hearing the past experience is there, so we might as well use them. It is not a given that the techniques Deaf people use to learn to read will be of any help to someone with typical hearing who can leverage the above, but of course if that were demonstrated empirically that would be great to know.

Also, phonics-enthusiasts, how can you read the word Worcester (pronounced Woo-ster), the names Siobhan (pronounced Shavahn) or Sean (pronounced Shawn) or words pronounced differently depending on the person Data, Tomato, Potato, Interesting, Vase.....and so on?

Phonics can be used as a default mode of decoding words, but some memorization is going to be necessary. The point is to get the reader to (possibly mentally) pronounce something that is recognizably the same as a word they have heard, so as long as the reader can guess that the "potato" that they're reading is the same as the "potahto" they say and hear out loud, they've gotten some benefit out of it.

(Aside: I'm not a linguist but I strongly suspect that "Siobhan" could be decoded with a set of phonics rules appropriate for the language or dialect it came from. While there are some common rules of English phonics that are likely to be useful almost universally, it may be appropriate to adapt phonics instruction regionally to account for the different levels of contact with languages/dialects with different phonetic rules.)
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 9:40 AM on December 6, 2024 [3 favorites]


[integrals as a] good example of where you pretty much have to know the building blocks and techniques by rote so you can put them together to do more complex problems.

Very much no. Which isn’t to say that first learning algorithmic steps without understanding isn’t effective for anyone.

I think what I meant was rather narrower than what you’re taking me to have meant? I didn’t say anything about facts and algorithms preceding understanding. I was essentially just talking about a specific example of this

Fluency with algorithms or recall of “math facts” helps many of us not have to try to hold too many details at once in our working memory when trying to puzzle out new mathematical ideas or solve problems, of course

I’m sure one can argue that the teaching of calculus overemphasizes things like fluently working out complicated antiderivatives on paper*, but if that is something one wants to do it’s impractical past a certain point without having the pattern recognition to reduce to a combination of simpler functions that one already knows how to deal with. That’s all.

* this does relate to a problem that I perceived, not speaking as a math educator, but just as a guy who took calculus, which is that there’s a lot of stuff where they show you why it works once, lucidly enough, but internalizing why it works is basically optional, strictly for the math enthusiasts, because that’s not actually what you’re evaluated on.
posted by atoxyl at 9:48 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]



The phonics focus on literacy confuses me - if phonics is how children learn to read, how do Deaf people learn to read?


With difficulty. A trawl through Google Scholar will show a smorgasbord of papers and theses on how to improve the state of the art in teaching deaf children to read.

How do Arabic children learn to read? With difficulty. The Arabic alphabet is beautiful but not good for legibility and the Turks abandoned it for good reason.

How do English speaking children learn to read? With difficulty, because English orthography and enunciation do not map like they once might have.

The question is how to do the best in the context, and with English the best method is to start with the small subset of English that is spelled and pronounced consistently, and let the kids work on harder vocabulary later.
posted by ocschwar at 10:12 AM on December 6, 2024 [4 favorites]


I will say this for reading curricula: regardless of early-age instructional methods, the vast majority of kids with the intelligence to be competent readers will end up competent readers. So, in a sense, many alternatives to phonics could have been advocated for in good faith.

Math curricula is another thing altogether. Most people do not end up competent in math, including many people with the intelligence to do so had they been properly instructed and guided. Meet someone under 40 who can do math well and almost to a man or woman they had several critical years where they were being tutored by parents or a hired coach to learn math for real while their in-class teachers were wasting time.
posted by MattD at 10:32 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]


I do wonder to what extent the success of this scam rests on an inferiority complex over English phonics being so obviously not best-in-class. I'm currently re-learning Czech, and some of the phonemes are a bit tricky - my ears have trouble distinguishing the long from the short vowels, and I'll never be able to pronounce the Czech ř correctly - but relearning the phonics was very easy.
posted by mscibing at 10:46 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]


I was appalled that anyone could believe that children will learn to read by some kind of magical osmosis, some beautiful mysterious sacred process that can't be known.

My thinking around this has always been that if you struggled to learn to read, you remember every last minute of the process by which you eventually figured it out. But if you didn't struggle, well...then you don't. And a lot of the people responsible for making these kinds of decisions in trendy pedagogical innovations (*in which I do not include educators themselves; they are seldom consulted on the matter of how they feel it would be best to conduct their classrooms) are the kind of people who never struggled to read, who just vaguely remember everything coming together one day and voilà! They could read their favorite picture book.

I myself couldn't tell you how I learned to read. I have no memory of drilling phonics and I'm pretty sure we didn't, just simply because I didn't go to very good early education schools at all. Did my parents read to me? Probably! Did they patiently help me sound out words? Who knows. Based on my memories the act of reading just sort of happened. Which is almost certainly not actually the case, but how would I know?? Probably the only reason I wouldn't fall for the "just believe in yourself and make some guesses" method is because I do spend so much time working with actual educators.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:58 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]


Also, phonics-enthusiasts, how can you read the word Worcester (pronounced Woo-ster), the names Siobhan (pronounced Shavahn) or Sean (pronounced Shawn) or words pronounced differently depending on the person Data, Tomato, Potato, Interesting, Vase.....and so on?

Apart from memorising, it's also switching pronunciation systems. If you can read more than one language, you pretty seamlessly switch from, for example, "a" being rhyming with "bay" in one language or with "car" in another. Or the way "oi" is in English as opposed to French.
posted by Zumbador at 11:46 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]


As someone with both training and experience in this area, this thread has been both fascinating and frustrating to read.

I think people without background beyond their own direct experience of learning to readay not realize that for kids getting phonics instruction, reading tends to develop in steps, with some overlap:

Pre-step: recognizing some words/symbols/logos from exposure, like knowing the McDonald's M.

Sounding out: slow, onerous figuring out of each sound of each word, with progressively more complex rules to follow, along with some sight-word memorization

Mature reading, however, is largely ideographic. We don't generally sound out words, we read them by shape. When kids make this switch, their accuracy takes a noticable but temporary hit, and it looks like they are guessing at the words (they kind of are. So are you, but with orders of magnitude more skill).

Having the foundation of sounding out, however, gives mature readers the skill to read words they don't already know ideographically, like the aforementioned Latin names, and newly-coined terms. It also allows them to better participate in new word formation in writing and make better guesses of how to spell words they only know orally and non-English words

Working in Special Ed, there are kids who don't make that leap to mature readers, or breaking down words phonetically ("c"+"a"+"t") doesn't really compute. For them, direct ideographic instruction can be really effective (I would guess this would also be true for many deaf kids). Edmark was the curriculum the teachers I worked with liked, and it works best if it progresses to include word parts like prefixes and suffixes. This is less flexible for encountering novel words, but miles better than never learning to read fluently.

Generally, if readers are spending a lot of cognitive effort decoding, their ability to comprehend and analyze is VERY limited, so fluent decoding is generally a precursor to analyzing written texts, though non/pre readers can and should be analyzing texts they take in in other ways (eg read alouds)
posted by DebetEsse at 11:46 AM on December 6, 2024 [8 favorites]


because that’s not actually what you’re evaluated on.

I mean. Yes. A key part of changing a curriculum is changing the assessments.


I myself couldn't tell you how I learned to read.

I don’t remember precisely how I learned to read either, but I’m fortunate to have a good enough relationship with my parents that I’ve asked them about this before, and being adults and present at the time, they had more of the details on that process to fill in the gaps in my memory. So I know for example that my parents worked on letter recognition from an infant/toddler age (through games and songs and such - like Sesame Street, which we also watched), and read to me a bunch. They didn’t work on individual letter sounds particularly (my brother got some supplemental phonics instruction later because that was a thing that seemed like it would be helpful for him), but did sound out words with a bit of emphasis on phonemes. Between home and school, I did get direct instruction in spelling and grammar that helped me see the various patterns in the exceptions to the main rules. So I never directly or explicitly memorized word sounds or spellings, but did get enough practice through related activities that I remembered stuff (though this has typically seemed to require less practice and repetition for me than for many other folks). But also that my brother’s process involved some overlap and some differences. I remember more of learning to write, but for me that was mostly practicing letter formation as a motor skill thing, since I was already reading at that point. But lots of other people learn reading and writing simultaneously, of course.


Possibly we would have better discussions of especially earlier education topics here on Metafilter if more folks talked about their experiences as teachers and parents, and asked someone who was able to have a clearer picture at the time for more details about their own early learning process. We’re each the world’s foremost experts on how that process felt to us or how we experienced it, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to having a good understanding of the structure of how our learning happened.
posted by eviemath at 11:55 AM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]


I will say this for reading curricula: regardless of early-age instructional methods, the vast majority of kids with the intelligence to be competent readers will end up competent readers.

Most people do not end up competent in math

Obviously there is an issue where many people just bounce off the way math is taught, and a massive range in what level of math education people get to, but I feel like this impression is exaggerated by math having more formally defined tiers of competence? There’s a pretty big range in how good people are at interpreting things they read, too. Or in how much they like reading.

Meet someone under 40 who can do math well and almost to a man or woman they had several critical years where they were being tutored by parents or a hired coach to learn math for real while their in-class teachers were wasting time.

That’s not really consistent with my experience (I was a natural verbal kid while more of my friends were naturals at math, probably most of us had some help from parents but none of us had intensive tutoring or a hired coach).
posted by atoxyl at 12:03 PM on December 6, 2024 [4 favorites]


Mature reading, however, is largely ideographic. We don't generally sound out words, we read them by shape.

Except that the cognitive science suggests that this isn't true: rapid adult readers are still skimming across the words with their eyes from beginning to end, reading each letter in order. They just do so very quickly and unconsciously. In the podcast, they go on at length about this research.

Though that doesn't explain the weird thing where we can read jumbled words so lnog as the frsit and lsat ltetres are the smae.
posted by jb at 5:46 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]


As someone who has recently began tutoring using the Orton-Gillingham style, I am now a phonics true believer. While the kids I work with need a lot of practice, they are making progress. Once I figure out the appropriate level of challenge for a kid, it feels like magic.

Personally I think learning to teach phonics has slowed my reading speed, I now hear what I’m reading when that wasn’t the case before. But I definitely would have counted as a hyperlexic kid, so my experience is an outlier.
posted by Trifling at 6:13 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]


how do Deaf people learn to read?

With difficulty.


This is bigoted bullshit. Please don't disseminate the eugenic claptrap of Alexander Graham Bell.

Educate yourself.
posted by Toddles at 7:00 PM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]


oschwar - the challenges deaf students face in literacy is largely because the educational system that they're placed in is MASSIVELY deficient to their needs. This is a problem with all curricula written for hearing students and adapted for deaf ones, phonics included, and this is what you're seeing when you do a superficial troll of Google Research. Naomi Caselli of BU's Deaf Center has a nice soundbite about current issues.

There are separate reading curricula for DHH kids that are not phonics-based—most deaf ed'sters I know like Bedrock Literacy—but 85% of deaf kids in California (for instance) are mainstreamed, being educated in hearing classrooms and subjected to educational schemes that have no relationship to their needs, on top of often facing some degree of language deprivation that hugely complicates their education.

If you dig deeper, you'll find that culturally-Deaf students who grow up in Deaf households generally don't face these problems—they have literacy scores that look more like their hearing peers. This is because they're typically immersed in sign language from birth (avoiding language deprivation) and are read to and have other pre-literacy experiences more like hearing children, but they are having them in ASL (or another natural sign langauge) which are not only separate languages from English but also have no written form of their own.

A new meta analysis of 70 studies just came out from the University of Exeter which found positive correlations between every dimension of sign language learning—mastery of vocabulary, grammar, sign formation and placement, etc. and similar dimensions of spoken/written language learning. Here's a writeup.

As a Deaf professor of deaf education put it,
Deaf readers are the ultimate plot twist for the Science of Reading. SoR insists sound-based approaches (oral language, phonics, phonological awareness) are required. Yet here we are, a whole community of deaf folks reading without hearing or speaking a word. What does that tell you?
posted by Playdoughnails at 7:58 PM on December 6, 2024 [9 favorites]


Interestingly, Danish has high phonemic depth (complexity of sound encoding) like English... guess what? Danish children also struggle to learn to read.

Yes and no. Danish kids take longer to learn to read, but by late teens they're caught up to the global peers. It's also worth noting that you start formal education later in Denmark - I moved from Denmark to the UK as a child, and went straight from kindergarten (barely able to recognise or scrawl out the alphabet) to the middle of year two in primary (why can't you read and write yet?? Oh and everything's in a new foreign language for you!) So it's possible that some of the delay is just due to education starting later.


you don't phonics out every word or multiply every number past primary school.

I never learned any times tables (I hate rote learning now, but I can't describe the passion with which my younger self held this opinion) but can do quick mental arithmetic. I absolutely do the multiplication in my head every time still, and it's nearly three decades since I left primary.


Meet someone under 40 who can do math well and almost to a man or woman they had several critical years where they were being tutored by parents or a hired coach to learn math for real while their in-class teachers were wasting time.

This is so far from true in my experience. I know many engineers, a few actual mathematicians, and lots of people stuff excellent maths skills (my own are decent, but I doubt I'd've hacked university level maths) and nobody I know had any tutoring, the vast majority at state schools. A lot of people have an aptitude for maths. I literally taught myself simple multiplication by thinking about dice and card games before I started school. No tutoring, no textbooks, just a weirdo precocious child with an aptitude for analytical thinking.
posted by Dysk at 11:41 PM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]


if you struggled to learn to read, you remember every last minute of the process by which you eventually figured it out. But if you didn't struggle, well...then you don't. And a lot of the people responsible for making these kinds of decisions in trendy pedagogical innovations ...are the kind of people who never struggled to read, who just vaguely remember everything coming together one day and voilà! They could read their favorite picture book.

I think this is ultimately the issue, but with an additional plot point. The people who are in charge are the people who were going to be competent readers either way and who have bitter memories of having useless and annoying 'help' forced on them. So they are genuinely trying to save children from those terrible experiences that make them have negative associations with reading. They just don't realize those experiences are only terrible for competent readers in an undifferentiated system.
posted by corb at 11:52 AM on December 7, 2024


oschwar - the challenges deaf students face in literacy is largely because the educational system that they're placed in is MASSIVELY deficient

I compared literacy education for deaf students with literacy education for native Arabic speakers, and you guys put so many words in my mouth that I never said.
posted by ocschwar at 4:56 PM on December 7, 2024 [3 favorites]


How do Arabic children learn to read? With difficulty. The Arabic alphabet is beautiful but not good for legibility and the Turks abandoned it for good reason.

Written with explicit short-vowel markings, as it is for children, written Arabic is not hard to learn for native speaker children. What is more difficult is moving onto the next stage of literacy but that's because of the massive diglossia of Arabic between normal spoken and prestige spoken / literary forms. Classical or modern standard Arabic is much more different to the spoken dialects than is typical of other languages. How big an issue this is also depends on how close the dialect is to the Peninsular dialect reflected in classical Arabic, Moroccan Arabic for example has way more influence from the Berber substratum than Levantine Arabic does from its Aramaic substrata (and Aramaic and Arabic are more similar to begin with). Even the most conservative rural dialects in Saudi though are still quite different from written Arabic.

The difference (although you'd know this better than me, I'm sure) between modern Israeli Hebrew and Mishnaic or biblical Hebrew is quite a lot smaller, partially by construction: the language revivalists were quite deliberate in using that source material to structure the modern version of the language. Also, it is the modern version of the language that is used in official written documents, textbooks, and literature, so even if one never did really study the biblical version as part of religious education it wouldn't really affect normal literacy.

The Turks abandoned it because its completely unsuited to Turkic phonology which is different, you could, if you wanted to, accurately write down dialectical Arabic using the Arabic writing system, it's just that for cultural reasons, educated Arabs are completely allergic to that.
posted by atrazine at 2:22 AM on December 9, 2024 [2 favorites]


I will say this for reading curricula: regardless of early-age instructional methods, the vast majority of kids with the intelligence to be competent readers will end up competent readers. So, in a sense, many alternatives to phonics could have been advocated for in good faith.

What is a "competent reader"? I know of home-schooled kids whose educator was "kids will learn to read eventually", and at least one of them has a serious problem with literacy. Their parents are both university degree holding engineers.

To me, an actual competent reader is someone who can read a 500 page novel in 1-2 days, can read text upside down without noticing, and can read text while engaging in a conversation in a different topic in parallel, and has a solid grasp of the content, meaning and subtext of text they read; reading is effortless, fast and leaves plenty of mental capacity deeper understanding. Many, many people aren't very good at reading in my experience.

My kid's reading was only rescued by a manual covid-19 era intervention, using phonics. They went from Kindergarten level reading to Grade 5 level reading with 3 months of focused phonics and then 3 months of recreational reading. And while the plural of anicdote is not data, we do have data that shows teaching kids using phonics based approaches generates higher success rates at producing literate children than any other method, including mixed methods (Johannes Ziegler, Paul Gioia, Jerome Deauvieau; 2024).

And the effect is pretty large. Imagine if we discovered that if you paint a car red, it was twice as fast, and the more red you paint it, the faster it goes. And what we have in schools is blue cars with thin red racing stripes painted on.

Math curricula is another thing altogether. Most people do not end up competent in math, including many people with the intelligence to do so had they been properly instructed and guided. Meet someone under 40 who can do math well and almost to a man or woman they had several critical years where they were being tutored by parents or a hired coach to learn math for real while their in-class teachers were wasting time.


I mean, again, what is competent in math? Can pay for things using modulo-dollar tricks? Can calculate tips without paper? Doesn't consider splitting a bill based on what you purchased at a shared meal to be work? Can understand why "my favourite prime number is 91" is funny? Knows why Brexit made the path integral around the UK zero? Confuses donuts and coffee cups?

Most people aren't as competent as they could be at any skill worth learning unless they put extra effort into it.

I'm unaware of anything like "using method X to teach math produces clearly better results" anywhere close to the impact of "teach early reading using phonics".

And yes, phonics based early reading runs into problems with English being an insanely spelled language. As I have said, I personally don't read by sounding out letters. The point of phonics based education is making sounding out words be effortless; this lets you take a stab at unfamiliar words on your own, which every word starts out as. This baseline ability to read lets you read more, and at that point you can either (a) get the kid to read a bunch and come up with their own techniques for further optimization, or (b) teach further optimization on top of it explicitly.

Phonics is the equivalent of "how do you teach a toddler how to toddle". Knowing how to pronounce Siobhan becomes the equivalent of being able to run a 5k race (ie, you memorize it, or you learn enough Irish/Gaelic to decode it as a loan-word; the second strategy ends up being efficient with Latin/French loanwords in practice).
posted by NotAYakk at 7:52 AM on December 9, 2024


can read text upside down without noticing, and can read text while engaging in a conversation in a different topic in parallel, and has a solid grasp of the content, meaning and subtext of text they read;

Are you Batman?
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:17 AM on December 9, 2024 [1 favorite]


tach kids to read in mirrors underwater while conducting an orchestra and fighting a bear; grade on type of bear fought and reviews of the concert.
posted by sagc at 8:31 AM on December 9, 2024 [2 favorites]


Not to say that "[smart people] will be competent readers" even really bears out as an argument; how do you know someone's not just, say, frustrated by reading because it's a struggle, but otherwise perfectly 'smart' by whatever standard it is that dictates who a competent reader is?
posted by sagc at 8:32 AM on December 9, 2024 [1 favorite]


To me, an actual competent reader is someone who can read a 500 page novel in 1-2 days, can read text upside down without noticing, and can read text while engaging in a conversation in a different topic in parallel, and has a solid grasp of the content, meaning and subtext of text they read; reading is effortless, fast and leaves plenty of mental capacity deeper understanding. Many, many people aren't very good at reading in my experience.

To me, an actual competent body is one that can perform a gymnastics floor routine at Olympic levels with enough time and energy left over to bake a cake. Many, many people aren't very good at having bodies, in my experience.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:34 AM on December 9, 2024 [2 favorites]


To me, an actual competent reader is someone who can read a 500 page novel in 1-2 days, can read text upside down without noticing, and can read text while engaging in a conversation in a different topic in parallel, and has a solid grasp of the content, meaning and subtext of text they read; reading is effortless, fast and leaves plenty of mental capacity deeper understanding. Many, many people aren't very good at reading in my experience.


Speaking as someone who can consistently do all but one of these things (depending on the text and my level of engagement with it, i can't always successfully carry on a parallel conversation, but it's an attention issue, not a reading issue. The book will always win over the conversation!), i would say that people who can do all of these things are exceptional, not merely competent. This isn't a humblebrag; this is an acknowledgement that several of these things are pretty high-level skills!

(On preview: what We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese said.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:01 AM on December 9, 2024 [1 favorite]


Written with explicit short-vowel markings, as it is for children, written Arabic is not hard to learn for native speaker children.

I think it's weird to deny the difference in degree between distinguishing Latin letters compared to Arabic, compared to Hebrew.

يبتني رشش رزدذ ططظ

Some nonsense examples just to show how un-ergonomic this writing system is.
posted by ocschwar at 9:26 AM on December 9, 2024


Well maybe there's a difference between the simplest version of written Arabic characters and the simplest version of written Latin or Hebrew characters but it doesn't look any more challenging than most Latin character cursives. I have to admit that I don't know how Arabic writing is actually taught to native speaker children.

In my case (but I learned as an adult so that's completely different) it took me longer to learn to read Arabic characters than to learn to read Hebrew but it's a matter of degree since I got to the point where I could sound-out a words written with harakat / niqqud in only a few weeks in both. Again, I'm an adult learner which is of course different, but in neither case did I get the feeling that this was a major part of learning the respective languages (a task which remains very much uncompleted although I could manage to order a coffee and read the newspaper at least).

Compare that to people who study ideographic languages for years to learn a pretty minimal character set.

Maybe you're right and there is research on this being a literacy barrier for children learning Arabic. I know for a fact that there is such research for children learning to read in ideographic languages (although those languages usually have very high literacy rates in the 21st century), I also know for a fact that there is both research and many years of debate on the effect of Arabic diglossia on mass literacy in the Arabic speaking world, and there is some (but not as much as I would have thought) research on how phonemic complexity in different Latin alphabet languages affects literacy in native speaker children which confirms that English and Danish seem to be a little more difficult than Dutch or German.
posted by atrazine at 10:05 AM on December 9, 2024 [2 favorites]


I know how both Arabic and Hebrew are taught to native Hebrew speaking kids, first hand.

Both languages have the ease of the orthography matching the phonetics with almost no irregular cases. Both languages have the norm of teaching with diacritics at first, and then dropping them for more "grown up" readings. At that point you have to surmise the vowels fromcontext, and since both languages use vowel arrangements for conjugating nouns and verbs, it's not that difficult.

What is more difficult is distinguishing one letter from another. For example, there are the 6 Arabic letters that are just one wave with 1/2/3 dots, either above or below. Hebrew letters are just way more distinct form each other, and the calligraphic elements of the Hebrew Assyrian written system, though slower to write, are more catching to the eye. More serifs than Latin, effectively.

The diglossia is another challenge. Since the vowels are dropped and you suss them out from context, when the context is a different dialect, with a different vocabulary, it's more difficult. Again that's much harder with Arabic because the dialects vary more in both time and space, and there's the reluctance to write down colloquial Arabic. (In Hebrew, if an idiom is embarrassing to put in writing, it's deemed gauche to speak as well.)

I'm having trouble moving from my DUolingo/MSA/Fusha Arabic practice to understanding footage from Syria even though I learned Levantine Arabic in school. And that's partly because every time I set out to brush up on Arabic I have to remind myself (which is one dot above, again?) and the like.
posted by ocschwar at 10:51 AM on December 9, 2024


oschwar - I wanted to convey that the issues surrounding deaf education are manifold, and rooted in a history of 19th century eugenic bigotry, and not tightly linked to issues of phonics per se.

This is an incredibly contentious area; my friend, a professional speech-language pathologist, has received death threats against her family for advocating for sign language in the classroom. You may have stepped on a landmine, but you need to know that it's not a topic that lends itself to casual equivalence.
posted by Playdoughnails at 1:40 PM on December 9, 2024 [3 favorites]


Ok, noted for future reference.
posted by ocschwar at 4:59 PM on December 9, 2024 [1 favorite]


I hope this turns into a class action.
posted by jrishel at 8:51 AM on December 10, 2024


how do Deaf people learn to read?

With difficulty.

This is bigoted bullshit. Please don't disseminate the eugenic claptrap of Alexander Graham Bell.

Educate yourself.
posted by Toddles at 10:00 PM on December 6 [2 favorites +] [⚑]


It still is difficult - not because Deaf children aren't capable, but many are trying to learn to read in a second language (e.g., English) and not their first (e.g., ASL). A friend of mine is an ASL interpreter with deep ties within the Deaf community, and they were the one to tell me this.
posted by jb at 10:19 AM on December 10, 2024


Deaf readers are the ultimate plot twist for the Science of Reading. SoR insists sound-based approaches (oral language, phonics, phonological awareness) are required. Yet here we are, a whole community of deaf folks reading without hearing or speaking a word. What does that tell you?

It tells me that phonics is not the ONLY part of reading one needs to teach. But for speakers of a sound-based language using a phonetic alphabet, phonics is very important.

The argument from the "science of reading" side has never been "Teach only phonics"; it has been, "Please teach phonics", especially with beginning readers - because that's what curricula like the one that made Calkins famous completely fail to do.
posted by jb at 10:24 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]


jb - not to belabor the “Deaf read different” issue, but the rest of Dr. Holcomb’s thread is worth reading in full:
Neuroimaging data consistently reveals that skilled deaf readers process words semantically rather than phonologically. Their reading skills correlate with orthography-semantic tasks, not phonological tasks, having faster semantic connectivity compared to hearing readers.

Another neuroimaging study shows deaf readers don’t rely on phonological coding. In semantic categorization & lexical decision tasks, hearing readers were influenced by pseudohomophones, but deaf readers treated them like any pseudoword—behaviorally & neurologically.

These findings confirm that skilled deaf readers bypass phonology when reading. The “optimal” reading system differs for deaf vs. hearing individuals, challenging the requirement of phonology for reading. The brain is flexible and can engage in different reading mechanisms.

Science of Reading often claims that all readers need phonics/phonological awareness. From my experience on state-level committees, SoR has yet to fully embrace the fact that deaf readers can succeed without phonics/phonological awareness, still mandating these pillars with “adaptations”.
Phonics may help hearing readers—and some deaf readers who have access to spoken English—but the research Dr. Holcomb cites shows that there are clearly other ways to learn to read. And they are not the only deaf Ed researcher saying that Science of Reading advocates are not taking deaf students needs into account. In fact, if you visit the Bluesky thread, you’ll find an SoR advocate right there insisting that deaf readers like Dr. Holcomb are somehow accessing phonology when they do not hear and do not speak.

This is a major derail—deaf kids are a tiny and highly specialized group in education —at the tail end of a dying discussion, but I would urge SoR folks to check out the links I provided. Science of reading isn’t science when it disregards the science of deaf readers, and it won’t help them read if it imposes a hearing model of reading on them.
posted by Playdoughnails at 5:05 PM on December 10, 2024 [5 favorites]


One aspect not mentioned here is the impact on families and communities. From a Reddit comment by u/bubblegumdavid, “… And the worst part: The adults in their families can't get resources because the adults can't read well either, or the adults just can't communicate in English, and their kids aren't able to help bridge the gap the way they used to for multilingual families.
Food pantries, school supply drives, everything to help people in need now needs to be communicated directly and verbally via multiple languages in addition to any written flyers. …”

I also noticed that Calkins supposedly first released a phonics unit in 2018 according to this article, which makes a much better case for her reasoning than anything else I’ve seen.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-calkins-child-literacy-teaching-methodology/680394/

About halfway down the article, there’s the quote: “I’ve never heard of a kindergarten teacher who doesn’t teach phonics,” Calkins replied.

I still think the buck stops with the schools, who chose the curriculum and made the teachers teach it “with fidelity” (unswervingly, to maintain consistency), and then enforced fraudulent grading schemes that pulled the wool over the eyes of even caring and involved parents.

Three cuing sounds obviously silly, but there’s no guarantee that an alternative curriculum will be better, even if it’s been branded with a term that includes the word “Science.”

In addition to phonics, there’s a huge need for background knowledge and exposure to vocabulary. Phonics is often boring for teachers, and could be the responsibility of teachers who have chosen it as a focus. It is important that students be grouped by their level/learning needs, which will make larger groups feasible and instruction more efficient. There needs to be testing and intervention so that students get more individualized support if needed once they are at the point of needing to read to learn.

Thanks to all who have contributed their knowledge of different cultures and leaning needs above - the differences are fascinating!
posted by puffinaria at 12:40 PM on December 12, 2024


Reminder that urls aren’t automatically turned into links, but can easily be made linkable (thus contributing to site accessibility) by using the “link” button in the quick-access edit buttons immediately below the comment input window. (The link button is the one on the far right of the row of buttons just under the comment box.) Linking urls properly ourselves saves mod time for actual site moderation, too!
posted by eviemath at 4:50 PM on December 12, 2024 [1 favorite]


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