Phonics
Like most kids that went to school in the 90s in America, I learned to read with phonics. I didn’t think there really was any other way to do so.
Then I came across The Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read:
As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”
The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.
Say what? How on earth is teaching phonics “colonizing”?
The progressive way of teaching, it turns out, meant that kids didn’t actually learn to read. Or, my guess from reading between the lines, is that wealthier kids had tutors or stay-at-home moms to teach them phonics and reading while poorer kids simply languishes.
And what’s even more bizarre is that despite overwhelming evidence of this, progressive teachers are still fighting against teaching “boring” phonics. I’m not so sure it’s a naïve case of good intentions paving the road to hell. It looks more like dogmatic ideology unwilling to yield to reality.
In a semi-related piece, Virginia officials blame lagging test scores on pandemic school closures:
The differences were particularly stark in mathematics. Two-thirds of students passed math exams last school year, compared to 82 percent before the pandemic. Racial and economic disparities also widened, with White and Asian students making more progress toward their pre-pandemic levels than Black and Hispanic students.
Passage rates remained more than 20 points behind pre-pandemic levels in math for Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students, and among students learning English.
All groups fared better in reading than they did in math, but state officials said that was due to the fact that standards were lowered in 2021, and cautioned against optimism.
Not surprisingly:
The standards of learning data also showed that schools that returned to in-person instruction sooner fared considerably better than schools that remained virtual or hybrid longer.
“Students whose schools were closed suffered the most,” Balow said.
And of course the teachers that were screaming for lockdowns and school closures, against all the scientific evidence to the contrary refuse to accept any responsibility:
Hutchings [Alexandria City Schools Superintendent] shuttered schools for most of the 2020-2021 school year and said he does not regret it.
“We were trying to save lives. How much does a life cost?” Hutchings said in an interview Thursday. “It’s very unfortunate that the state would use this information to begin to talk about whether schools should have been opened or closed two years ago.”
The only connection between these two stories is that for a certain group of people, partisan politics is more important than actually educating the next generation.