Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Readhttps://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/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.
Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver, who received an early and vivid lesson in the value of literacy in 1984 after his cousin got out of prison and told him the other inmates stopped harassing him when they realized he could read their mail to them. “It has been an unmitigated disaster.” In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland unified school district (OUSD) to ask it to include “explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension” in its curriculum.
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There are many schools of thought on how best to aid this process, but the main contretemps has been about whether kids need to be taught how to sound out words explicitly or whether, if you give them enough examples and time, they’ll figure out the patterns. The latter theory, sometimes known as whole language, says teaching phonics is boring and repetitive, and a large percentage of English words diverge from the rules. (Hello there, though, thought, through, trough and tough!) But if you immerse children in beautiful stories, they’ll be motivated to crack the code, to recognize each word. The counterargument is that reading is as connected to hearing as it is to sight. It begins, phonics advocates say, with speech. This understanding, and the data that supports it, has become known as the science of reading.
I'm no expert, but:
* I was taught to read with a heavy emphasis on phonics; it was "boring" because the teacher had to teach to the least quick to catch on, and I was among the quicker; as an adult, I believe that what the teacher did was correct;
* I was a homeschooling parent, 3 children, "grades" "K-12"; my wife did much more of the teaching than I did, but we taught our children to read using phonics and age-appropriate literature we knew they would enjoy.
IOW, I've been on both sides of the process. Sorry for the verbose background info.
This is not a new debate - phonics vs. "Whole Word" or "Whole Language" or
euphemism-du-jour. It has been going on at least since Rudolph Flesch's 1955 book
Why Johnny Can't Read. IOW, this debate has been going on for pretty much my entire lifetime, and public schools persist in using a method known to be inferior because it's "new" and the traditional method that works better is "boring" (to the teachers more so than to students, IMO).
