This isn't up to the usual quality of The Free Press. While teaching reading is very important and the reading problem is for certain, this podcast really fell short for me. While Ms. Hanford does a good job on the history of the problem, most of the podcast is her telling her opinions of everything about learning to read. Aren't opinions what caused the problem in the first place? What are Ms. Hanford's qualifications to be handing out her opinions? Where are the facts and research about what DOES work to teach reading, and why? Why didn't she identify reading programs that do work, instead of just naming those that are suspect? Why didn't Ms. Herzog probe deeper on what works?
Not sure the wealth gap can be generalized. Children are taught through narratives either aloud or in books in any setting, rich or poor. Feeling sorry for decades of mistakes in the public schools is a lack of leadership.
Thankfully my daughter isn’t a “rule follower”. Early in her teaching career she knew that “her kids” were struggling and she tossed the mandated methods and developed child centric approaches that work. The system doesn’t mess with her because she gets results. One teacher...20plus years...lucky kids.
Behavioral issues are a huge big deal. This is one of many reasons that I think school choice is essential. We need more schools that can pick up the slack in addressing behavioral issues. This is especially urgent with children from lower-income single parent households and dysfunctional households. Mainstreaming them into classrooms and calling it good is a crime. I feel like the whole inclusive classroom movement is misguided in many ways. Yes, we want kids with special needs to have opportunities to socialize with normies, but we've gone too far with that, too.
That said, pedagogy is a thing, and long-term experiments on students have shown that how we teach math and reading aren't working. And we need higher quality teachers as well. I think Massachusetts is the only state that tests teachers' math skills. What a shame more don't. Most middle school teachers cannot do fractions, decimals or percentages. Yikes. Math phobia is a teacher problem that gets passed onto students. Only math specialists should teach math given what we're dealing with in terms of most teachers lacking math skills.
I went and listened to the "Sold a Story" series after listening to this episode of Honestly and the thing that struck me about this the most was how closely what happened here seems to match what happened with COVID except the timeline is much longer. In both cases you had a bunch of people who "felt" they wee doing the right thing and they had no intellectual curiosity at all to determine if they were actually doing the right thing to achieve the result they wanted. What is worse is they dismissed anyone who did have the intellectual curiosity to ask questions about the status quo, much like with COVID. The teacher in the series outright admitting that she would not even consider the proposals from the Bush administration simply because it was Bush was very much akin to what we have seen over the last 3 years as well.
I have wondered during COVID how we got to the point where something as obvious as the facts of who the people were that were really at risk from the disease, which was obvious from at least early summer of 2020, was just completely ignored across the media landscape and by many seemingly educated people including health care workers. What was done to the kids of this country by these teachers over decades might be at least a partial explanation. What this story seems to show is an entire generation of teachers and teacher trainers that lack critical thinking skills and any academic curiosity. Is it possible that besides failing to teach the children to read they also simultaneously instilled those traits in our children over those decades? If so this is a far worse problem than kids not learning how to read, it is a problem of kids not learning how to think, granted those two things are coupled. I have to wonder if we are seeing the result of decades of kids actively, if not consciously, being taught not to think in many of the things going on in the world today. Perhaps this is a way bigger story than the kids can't read?
Every government entity needs a civilian review board for complaints. Police, schools, attorneys, courts & all court officers, building departments, social services.... the list goes on. Once a person or people
who gets an MPA's, MHA's, badges or Phd's, and go into a public administration they have power and money that is not theirs. They are completely beyond the hands of voters to realistically correct their mistakes or end their tenures. The overwhelming majority of people in these systems are excellent people pursuing their jobs mission. However, those who are bad are really, really bad. You need to be able to pull their license and torch their degrees. No one wants a dirty cop- take their badges and kick them out, right? Guess what, there are a lot more people that cause havoc with credentials than cops. They do life long damage to people in our society and burning peoples lives. JD's... a bad lawyer? Go to the BAR association and they will tell you to hire an attorney to deal with your bad attorney, who they go to events... let's not even get started on judiciary. Jesus would have to come back 30 times to get a bad judge out. Which leads us to education.... a bad admin or superintendent packs their bags and shuffles down the road to a new highly taxpayer paid opportunity with an executive compensation payout. It is outrageous in each case.
People need to be able to file streamlined complaints that have some teeth in the complaint. Seriously, what happens when you complain to school administrator about kids who have failed at that person's hand? That person who the school board hired- Is their mistake going to be heard or buried to save face or protect other mistakes? Pull their licenses and credentials when they fail kids. They do it to teachers, why not administrators.
The big divide in American adults is between those whose parents recognized the need to add reading instruction at home and those who didn't. I was born to and raised by parents who read for pleasure. By the time I began first grade, I could already read. My small town elementary school was a Dick and Jane reader environment with about equal emphasis on phonics. But I mostly understood that before it was part of my class work.
Kids whose parents don't read for pleasure will probably struggle with reading unless they are in the upper couple of quintiles of IQ. Once you are past elementary school and you aren't a competent reader, the opportunity for remediation is so stigmatized there just isn't much chance.
Universal Education Accounts that would allow parents freedom to use the money as they wish to educate their children make sense to me. I've been involved in education activism for about 15 years. I think a la carte options are the way to go and forget most everything about the institutional aspects. For people that don't need babysitting of their kids for K-12, great. For people that do, let them have nanny tutors instead of lowest common denominator classrooms. Let them invest in basics, enrichment, sports, whatever to develop their kid. I think it starts with a personal development plan and then navigation and execution of that plan as it evolves and responds over time.
This problem is not new. Rudolf Flesch documented it in his book, "Why Johnny Can't Read" first published in 1955, renewed in 1983. and "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" 1981. After reading these books, I got my 5 year old daughter started reading with phonics using McGuffy Readers.
I think this is a critically important topic, and I appreciate Honestly addressing it.
The interview seemed a bit peculiar to me. It began by addressing what I believe is the crux of the issue: radical and unwise reading instruction using the whole language approach. The interviewee seemed to be focused on the immediate problem, and I was initially enthusiastic about the direction the discussion was taking.
But then, past the mid-point, when the topic changed to "what do we do to fix this," suddenly we were talking about equity and family incomes and everything *except* the basic methodology of reading instruction. The word "phonics" did not occur once. It was as if two separate interviews were knitted together, the first correctly identifying the fundamental problem in reading instruction, and the second continuing as if we really had no idea what was wrong with reading instruction.
I'm not a professional educator, just a parent who homeschooled six children, three of them all the way through high school. My children can all read, and not one of them was ever exposed to this "whole language" approach to teaching.
"Sound it out." That's a simple instruction that children can easily comprehend and execute. As Ms. Hanford observed, kids know the words -- they just don't know how to read them. Phonetic discovery is an obvious way to lead kids into recognizing words without frankly ridiculous games of guessing based on pictures and context.
News from OH on this very issue: https://www.the74million.org/article/the-evidence-is-clear-ohio-gov-pushes-for-science-of-reading-as-only-approach/
Thanx mucho. This is a great vision for reform. Greatly appreciated.
teachers union is very destructive .
This isn't up to the usual quality of The Free Press. While teaching reading is very important and the reading problem is for certain, this podcast really fell short for me. While Ms. Hanford does a good job on the history of the problem, most of the podcast is her telling her opinions of everything about learning to read. Aren't opinions what caused the problem in the first place? What are Ms. Hanford's qualifications to be handing out her opinions? Where are the facts and research about what DOES work to teach reading, and why? Why didn't she identify reading programs that do work, instead of just naming those that are suspect? Why didn't Ms. Herzog probe deeper on what works?
Not sure the wealth gap can be generalized. Children are taught through narratives either aloud or in books in any setting, rich or poor. Feeling sorry for decades of mistakes in the public schools is a lack of leadership.
Thankfully my daughter isn’t a “rule follower”. Early in her teaching career she knew that “her kids” were struggling and she tossed the mandated methods and developed child centric approaches that work. The system doesn’t mess with her because she gets results. One teacher...20plus years...lucky kids.
I don’t know who that person is in my ID...ain’t me.
Behavioral issues are a huge big deal. This is one of many reasons that I think school choice is essential. We need more schools that can pick up the slack in addressing behavioral issues. This is especially urgent with children from lower-income single parent households and dysfunctional households. Mainstreaming them into classrooms and calling it good is a crime. I feel like the whole inclusive classroom movement is misguided in many ways. Yes, we want kids with special needs to have opportunities to socialize with normies, but we've gone too far with that, too.
That said, pedagogy is a thing, and long-term experiments on students have shown that how we teach math and reading aren't working. And we need higher quality teachers as well. I think Massachusetts is the only state that tests teachers' math skills. What a shame more don't. Most middle school teachers cannot do fractions, decimals or percentages. Yikes. Math phobia is a teacher problem that gets passed onto students. Only math specialists should teach math given what we're dealing with in terms of most teachers lacking math skills.
I went and listened to the "Sold a Story" series after listening to this episode of Honestly and the thing that struck me about this the most was how closely what happened here seems to match what happened with COVID except the timeline is much longer. In both cases you had a bunch of people who "felt" they wee doing the right thing and they had no intellectual curiosity at all to determine if they were actually doing the right thing to achieve the result they wanted. What is worse is they dismissed anyone who did have the intellectual curiosity to ask questions about the status quo, much like with COVID. The teacher in the series outright admitting that she would not even consider the proposals from the Bush administration simply because it was Bush was very much akin to what we have seen over the last 3 years as well.
I have wondered during COVID how we got to the point where something as obvious as the facts of who the people were that were really at risk from the disease, which was obvious from at least early summer of 2020, was just completely ignored across the media landscape and by many seemingly educated people including health care workers. What was done to the kids of this country by these teachers over decades might be at least a partial explanation. What this story seems to show is an entire generation of teachers and teacher trainers that lack critical thinking skills and any academic curiosity. Is it possible that besides failing to teach the children to read they also simultaneously instilled those traits in our children over those decades? If so this is a far worse problem than kids not learning how to read, it is a problem of kids not learning how to think, granted those two things are coupled. I have to wonder if we are seeing the result of decades of kids actively, if not consciously, being taught not to think in many of the things going on in the world today. Perhaps this is a way bigger story than the kids can't read?
Ironic. A column about reading, and I have to ... *listen* to it.
(Sorry, deal-breaker. I like reading.)
Every government entity needs a civilian review board for complaints. Police, schools, attorneys, courts & all court officers, building departments, social services.... the list goes on. Once a person or people
who gets an MPA's, MHA's, badges or Phd's, and go into a public administration they have power and money that is not theirs. They are completely beyond the hands of voters to realistically correct their mistakes or end their tenures. The overwhelming majority of people in these systems are excellent people pursuing their jobs mission. However, those who are bad are really, really bad. You need to be able to pull their license and torch their degrees. No one wants a dirty cop- take their badges and kick them out, right? Guess what, there are a lot more people that cause havoc with credentials than cops. They do life long damage to people in our society and burning peoples lives. JD's... a bad lawyer? Go to the BAR association and they will tell you to hire an attorney to deal with your bad attorney, who they go to events... let's not even get started on judiciary. Jesus would have to come back 30 times to get a bad judge out. Which leads us to education.... a bad admin or superintendent packs their bags and shuffles down the road to a new highly taxpayer paid opportunity with an executive compensation payout. It is outrageous in each case.
People need to be able to file streamlined complaints that have some teeth in the complaint. Seriously, what happens when you complain to school administrator about kids who have failed at that person's hand? That person who the school board hired- Is their mistake going to be heard or buried to save face or protect other mistakes? Pull their licenses and credentials when they fail kids. They do it to teachers, why not administrators.
The big divide in American adults is between those whose parents recognized the need to add reading instruction at home and those who didn't. I was born to and raised by parents who read for pleasure. By the time I began first grade, I could already read. My small town elementary school was a Dick and Jane reader environment with about equal emphasis on phonics. But I mostly understood that before it was part of my class work.
Kids whose parents don't read for pleasure will probably struggle with reading unless they are in the upper couple of quintiles of IQ. Once you are past elementary school and you aren't a competent reader, the opportunity for remediation is so stigmatized there just isn't much chance.
Universal Education Accounts that would allow parents freedom to use the money as they wish to educate their children make sense to me. I've been involved in education activism for about 15 years. I think a la carte options are the way to go and forget most everything about the institutional aspects. For people that don't need babysitting of their kids for K-12, great. For people that do, let them have nanny tutors instead of lowest common denominator classrooms. Let them invest in basics, enrichment, sports, whatever to develop their kid. I think it starts with a personal development plan and then navigation and execution of that plan as it evolves and responds over time.
Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read? Answer: Public Education
This problem is not new. Rudolf Flesch documented it in his book, "Why Johnny Can't Read" first published in 1955, renewed in 1983. and "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" 1981. After reading these books, I got my 5 year old daughter started reading with phonics using McGuffy Readers.
Math is just as bad.
I think this is a critically important topic, and I appreciate Honestly addressing it.
The interview seemed a bit peculiar to me. It began by addressing what I believe is the crux of the issue: radical and unwise reading instruction using the whole language approach. The interviewee seemed to be focused on the immediate problem, and I was initially enthusiastic about the direction the discussion was taking.
But then, past the mid-point, when the topic changed to "what do we do to fix this," suddenly we were talking about equity and family incomes and everything *except* the basic methodology of reading instruction. The word "phonics" did not occur once. It was as if two separate interviews were knitted together, the first correctly identifying the fundamental problem in reading instruction, and the second continuing as if we really had no idea what was wrong with reading instruction.
I'm not a professional educator, just a parent who homeschooled six children, three of them all the way through high school. My children can all read, and not one of them was ever exposed to this "whole language" approach to teaching.
"Sound it out." That's a simple instruction that children can easily comprehend and execute. As Ms. Hanford observed, kids know the words -- they just don't know how to read them. Phonetic discovery is an obvious way to lead kids into recognizing words without frankly ridiculous games of guessing based on pictures and context.
Sound it out.