Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

As someone who&#x27;s both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers&#x27; jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who&#x27;ve never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be shipped. They may have even &quot;observed developers&quot; or &quot;measured output&quot; in constructing these things, and thought they had figured out The Way and knew how to systematize it, and deserved to sell it for millions of dollars, along with training, books, etc.<p>EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: &quot;Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons&quot;. You don&#x27;t have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.

I just listened to this podcast a few weeks ago. What really struck me was just how obviously wrong the Guided Reading curriculum and three cueing theory was even just on its face, and how many people went along with replacing phonics with Guided Reading despite that.<p>For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that there&#x27;s no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that&#x27;s a level of stupidity that&#x27;s actually high enough to make me angry.<p>Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three cuing). Like, sure context <i>can</i> be a component of reading, but it&#x27;s trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so <i>clearly</i> context isn&#x27;t <i>that</i> important for strong readers, and teaching kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn&#x27;t need a scientific study to figure that out.

Again from the podcast:<p>Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?<p>Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don&#x27;t think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.<p>These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that were known to be wrong because they don&#x27;t like the style of the effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach people because you don&#x27;t like an effective approach is criminal.<p>Again from the podcast:<p>&quot;Good reading instruction isn’t boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring. But this shouldn’t be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need.<p>And there’s no reason that reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can’t be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she’s now selling.&quot;

All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are:<p>- if you just teach phonics you aren&#x27;t actually helping kids to read (they&#x27;ve tried) because reading is more than just sounds<p>- Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts<p>I also think it&#x27;s important to point out that APM Reports isn&#x27;t an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The Hollyhock Foundation and others. I&#x27;m not saying this model is bad or impugning anyone&#x27;s motives here; on the contrary I would say people are acting more or less in good faith. I&#x27;m just saying there are definitely agendas here.<p>For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading (SOR), have a look here [0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nepc.colorado.edu&#x2F;publication&#x2F;science-of-reading" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nepc.colorado.edu&#x2F;publication&#x2F;science-of-reading</a>

No one is talking about the impact of kids seeing parents read on phones instead kids seeing parents read on books. When kids see a parent reading a book there&#x27;s no doubt as to what they&#x27;re doing. They are reading.<p>OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. There is a nonzero chance that it could be interpreted by the child as the parent watching a video. Or playing a game.<p>Children have a very powerful desire to imitate, and it should not be ignored in the debate on literacy.

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they&#x27;re often very confident in their teaching methods.<p>I&#x27;m not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A&#x2F;B testing. I know, it&#x27;s a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn&#x27;t have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?<p>If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it&#x27;s probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn&#x27;t anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?<p>I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn&#x27;t read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn&#x27;t happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?<p>Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.

My daughter went through a Montessori education from 18 months old through grade 8. As part of her Montessori experience, starting at age three, she began to learn to write. They trace &quot;sandpaper&quot; letters with their fingers; moving their fingers along the strokes of letters pre-printed on cardboard in a rough texture. From there they learn to write the letters and words, speaking the words aloud. Thus the focus is on learning to write before reading, with an implication that this process will help with word recognition.<p>I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori things) surprising.

This is just my personal experience. My first son was able to read when he was 2.5 yo. I read Dr. Suess to him every night since he was 1 yo. At first I would read and let him finish the last word in the sentence, the rhyming part. One day I asked him to try reading the whole sentence and he did. I thought maybe I read to him so much that he memorized it, as I was starting to memorized some of the books. I switch to different book and he was able to read a few sentences. I tried a book we haven&#x27;t read yet (higher level Dr. Suess&#x27;s book) and he was able to read 20%. Taking turn on the pages made it fun and I tried to exaggerate some of the words to make it more dramatic, like CRASH!!!. Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that. Being a public support station, they tend to have sponsor promotions quite a bit, so my son was listing to classical music and people talking. I believe the music and the talking sound got him to be familiar with English phonic early, so when it comes to reading, the rhythm is not so strange. Sadly, with the second son, we had to split time with two kids and more work, we didn&#x27;t do the same routine. He was barely reading when he got into kindergarden. But thank God he had a great teacher in 1st grade, over zoom she taught most of the class to read. My kids actually excelled during pandemic teaching over zoom. Of course we were there to help them along. I think reading is priority one for any kid. Once they learn to read, they are more independent, read menu and decide for themselves, read instructions to build LEGOs, read street names, really open the world to them.

Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.

What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It&#x27;s often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they do this same &quot;whole language&quot; method instead of teaching people the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how to read a foreign language using their skills to put words together, and instead they fall back to the same &quot;guessing game&quot;. Especially when you get to languages with different alphabets, this jump can be very sudden and harsh to overcome.<p>When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from teaching people &quot;this is an alphabet&quot; to &quot;this is how to use words and sentences in that language&quot;. That might make sense if you&#x27;re using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to struggle that much with the German ß once you tell them it&#x27;s just pronounced like &quot;ss&quot; when you transliterate it), but when you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced differ <i>significantly</i> from your primary languages that barrier can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for grammatical rules, especially if they&#x27;re different compared to yours.<p>I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on, and that&#x27;s an alphabet with not even that many extra&#x2F;fewer characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.

Here&#x27;s a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school age kids that were considered &quot;unteachable&quot; (I can&#x27;t recall the exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in) I think they are about 4th or 5th grade.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=j9SjFsimywA">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=j9SjFsimywA</a><p>Many people didn&#x27;t like the strict requirement of his reading methods, from what I have been told.

I&#x27;m a heavy advocate of homeschooling and did that with my kids for a while before personal circumstances made it impractical for me. I used the book &quot;The Well trained mind&quot; as a general curriculum guide and bought books which it recommended. The one it pushed for teaching reading was <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;welltrainedmind.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-teaching-reading&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;welltrainedmind.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-...</a><p>I used this for my first two kids and am currently using it for my third. They pick up reading proficiency in a few months and you need to <i>consistently</i> spend about 20-30 minutes a day. The bonding that comes with your kids is an added bonus. After that, you establish a reading culture at home, blanket ban on electronic &quot;entertainment&quot; for the early years and they become good readers very quickly.<p>I lived in a bit of a bubble and when I met my kids&#x27; friends when they went to school, it was painful to see how crippled they were with basics skills and also tragic to see my own kids regress to the average in these skills.<p>The upshot of all this is that basic liberal education is not that hard to do for ones own kids and it gives them a lifelong advantage. I highly recommend it.

Teacher, educator and father of three kids here. I strongly disagree that &quot;there is not enough evidence based science in teaching&quot; etc. If there is something really to highlight what&#x27;s wrong with education systems all over the world, it&#x27;s too much &quot;evidence based science&quot;. Every educational psychologist and his dog has a novel theory how learning works, how something should be taught and have a ton of evidence why. And of course all generations of educators so far have been idiots. It&#x27;s THE reason nobody wants to teach any more.<p>&quot;Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession.&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;MEqrK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;MEqrK</a>)<p>The truth every teacher faces is that there is no single silver bullet. There is no any &quot;method&quot; in education that can replace simple things – time, effort, motivation, affiliation etc.

Well over a century ago now, my grandmother taught grades 1 through 8 in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Barring a substitute teacher when grandma was sick, she was the <i>only</i> teacher those kids ever saw until they went to the (fairly distant) high school for grade 9. Grandma was a good teacher, and every year the valedictorian at that HS was one of grandma&#x27;s students. The only &quot;central administration&quot; that she had to care about was the little school district&#x27;s Superintendent. He had no time, staff, nor budget for messing with things that worked. Nor possible upsides if he got any &quot;new ideas&quot; about education.<p>Grandma&#x27;s own education was high school, plus <i>maybe</i> a two-year teaching certificate from a Podunk little Normal School ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.britannica.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;normal-school" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.britannica.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;normal-school</a> ). Her three rules for teaching 8 grades in a 1-room school house were: (1) Make sure the 1st graders all learn to read, (2) Make sure the 8th graders learn everything they&#x27;ll need for high school, and (3) Make sure there&#x27;s plenty of older-kids-teach-younger-ones going on in between, because you&#x27;ve only got time to hit the high points for grades 2 to 7.<p>But a whole lot changed over the decades, as American &quot;Teacher Education&quot; grew from a bare-minimum service sector into a huge, self-serving established empire. Especially after WWII, an incredible amount of money flowed into colleges &amp; universities. Old stuff <i>that worked</i> couldn&#x27;t possibly get you ahead in that empire. &quot;Johnny can read&quot; results take a decade to play out in the real world. Vs. cool-sounding new ideas, especially if you could stick a &quot;Science&quot; label on &#x27;em (the status of &quot;science&quot; was <i>incredibly</i> boosted by WWII) and were skilled at spreading FUD and FOMO, could rocket you to success in the ever-growing academic &#x2F; administrator &#x2F; consultant &#x2F; author &#x2F; etc. Education Establishment.

For those readers who are skeptical whether this curriculum is really in widespread use, it definitely still is.<p>I have young kids and before listening to this podcast, my wife and I spent a bunch of time last Fall looking at schools for our eldest to start Kindergarten, because San Francisco&#x27;s lottery system means there&#x27;s no default school.<p>A lot of schools, even fancy private schools, used materials designed for this three cues reading curriculum. We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read &quot;Mouse sees bear&quot;.<p>These books had two problems that were obvious to us as parents: You don&#x27;t need to know how to read in order to appear to read the book (just be shown the pattern for what to say on each page), and the books are _incredibly boring_ -- even our 2-year-old wouldn&#x27;t be interested in reading such a book. The teachers we talked to said things that in retrospect echo the marketing lines for this curriculum that you here about in this podcast.<p>We Googled why these stupid books are being used in schools at all, and found <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apmreports.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apmreports.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;whats-wrong-ho...</a> (An earlier article the by the host of the Sold a Story podcast). I recommend the article for folks who want to read something on the topic, though the podcast is the result of her considerably deeper investigation into why this is happening, and I highly recommend it as well for those who have the time.<p>We ended up sending our daughter to a Montessori school; we picked it for several reasons, but one observation is that because they have their own philosophy about how to teach reading and writing, they&#x27;re relatively resilient to this sort of fake &quot;science&quot; based fad.<p>(Other things we saw visiting schools that made me sad included plentiful posters about the CUBES math strategy, which felt like an algorithm for being able to produce the correct answer to a word problem without actually reading and understanding the words -- i.e. an adaptation of the math curriculum to a world where many children struggle to read).

My kids go to a school that teaches phonics. Some of my teacher friends have told me that phonics is antiquated, so it does make me happy to see that perhaps it is the best method of learning to read. It has worked well for kids so far.<p>I will say though that the school&#x27;s method of teaching phonics is much more rigorous than anything I ever learned as a kid. They have a long list of graphemes (letters and letter combinations), and they need to be able to recite all the phonemes (sounds) that each grapheme can make. I have a hard time answering their phonics questions, like if they ask me what sounds &quot;ou&quot; makes. It can make at least four sounds, e.g. sour, group, court, country. I can&#x27;t confidentially help them without a cheatsheet.

IMHO reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom. Kids need to be interested in reading, and that&#x27;s up to the parents more than it is to the school.<p>My very unique &#x2F; personal take. Have been doing sight words with my 5yo for the last two weeks. He just started his second term of prep (pre year 1). He&#x27;s not advanced as far as I can&#x27;t tell, but I&#x27;ll tell you it&#x27;s exhilarating to watch his progress. He absolutely loves the challenge of it. And he&#x27;s already sounding out and reading short, repetitive books based on known words. He&#x27;s a lucky kid for so many reasons. Not a great case in point for the same.<p>All kids are different, with unique needs, and schools should be expected to adapt to these. But it&#x27;s a two way street. If an individual isn&#x27;t reading by fourth grade, after four years of schooling, then something is going on .. either at home or in a cognitive sense. If a whole class isn&#x27;t reading, then sure - look at the curriculum ... but there&#x27;s probably something more systemic at play.

Hot take, but: the same issue is present in math, with the aggressive deprioritization of rote learning of arithmetic. People need a foundation upon which to build higher concepts; knowing your times tables is necessary to grasp division algorithms.<p>The emphasis (in reading, and math) on the wider concepts rather than the boring learning is a problem.

A bit offtopic, but i find it interesting, how young kids ask A LOT of questions... &quot;how does that work? why is that like that? Where did that come from? How come this is that? How do you do that? How did we do that befire this? ....&quot;, and then we put those kids through the schooling system, and the kids seem uninterested in anything, the questions stop and teaching them stuff becomes a pain for many.

Me, I stick with Stephen Krashen&#x27;s hypothesis, borne out by my own experience: compelling, comprehensible input is the key. This applies to both your first language acquired when you are young and any other languages later.<p>Start with reading to kids, then give them access to wide selection of books to choose from. Comic books are good, too.<p>I have many criticisms of the education I received as a youngster, but they did get this right.

This reminds me of an article in the <i>Atlantic</i> I liked [1], which argued that the real problem for American education is that it places too much emphasis on the mechanics of reading comprehension, leaving content-oriented coursework such as history, science, and sociology on the back burner. Three-cueing or any other inference-based approach to reading isn&#x27;t going to work when kids don&#x27;t have enough knowledge about the world to make good inferences.<p>It&#x27;s good to hear that phonics are making something of a comeback. But it seems like other things will need to change too. I spent some time teaching freshman English at a state university -- when a kid stumbles over a word like &quot;infrastructure,&quot; one senses that the literacy problem goes beyond the sonic properties of printed text.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;the-radical-case-for-teaching-kids-stuff&#x2F;592765&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;the-rad...</a>

My kid is six and can read 100+ page kids books in about an hour (she doesn&#x27;t do this super often though). It wasn&#x27;t too hard to teach her to get there either, but repetition is key.<p>We started when she was 4 by reciting all the sounds each letter could do each night. It used to take us almost an hour to get to Z, but eventually she got it down fast. I tried to make it as fun as possible. Then we would do two to three letter words and have her figure out the words by using those sounds (sometimes trying various combinations until something made sense). We did that a few nights each week for a few months while she was playing. You can&#x27;t force it, but I could usually get a few words in here and there. Then we started very simple sentences with the various Bob, Learning Dynamics...etc books. This was a big shift, but became easy soon enough. After she got through ~50 of those short little books, we moved on to the beginning chapter books when she was almost 6. She could earn certain privileges like TV if she reads a book. I kept reading to her (story time) as well each night. She&#x27;s in kindergarten and reads like a champ now. Her school work goes over additional phonics stuff which is good to fill in any gaps she got from my very non-academic methods (I never really learned the rules as a kid...I just liked reading and I guess picked things up organically). It&#x27;s pretty cool that she can pretty much just read anything now that isn&#x27;t a very unusual word you just have to know. She sometimes guesses at words though that are wrong, so we&#x27;re working on slowing down a little bit.<p>It&#x27;s a balancing act though. You don&#x27;t want to make it such a chore that they don&#x27;t want to read later, but I just don&#x27;t think the math and reading is very good at school so far, so I&#x27;m trying to supplement. Spending a few hours on reading and math outside of school each week seems to eat up a small amount of free time, but lead to big successes.

For learning to read English at age 3 or 4, I often recommend a video called &quot;The Letter Factory&quot; and its first sequel &quot;The Word Factory&quot;. Not a fan of the 3rd one, but these 2 are amusing cartoons that my kid liked a lot, and now really enjoys reading. Just one data point, take it or leave it ;-)

I was very lucky and my mother was a teacher at a private school when I was young, so I got to attend for free. I had phonics-based reading instruction, and learned to read acceptably in first grade. By fourth grade I was one of the best readers in the school, and ended up in a gifted program.<p>I still remember and feel appreciation for my first grade teacher, Mrs. Drown, for teaching me to read. It opened an entire world for me.<p>The public schools where I lived did not use phonics, and when I entered the gifted program I shifted to public school. I met people in high school who were considered average students that had less literacy than I did in fourth grade. The overall literacy rate in our small city was lower than the national average as well.

Educational researcher here. There&#x27;s no such thing as a &quot;science of reading.&quot; It&#x27;s part of the highly politicized &quot;reading wars&quot; (see also the &quot;math wars&quot; which has been going on for decades). It&#x27;s no coincidence that Republicans are pushing phonics as the end all be all solution to teaching reading, and you can cherry pick educational research studies that support or disconfirm various teaching strategies. Phonics has its place, contexts where it is appropriate and beneficial, but it is not the sole strategy that works or should be used in every context.<p>A recent meta-analysis <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;338494581_Meta-Analysis_of_the_Impact_of_Reading_Interventions_for_Students_in_the_Primary_Grades" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;338494581_Meta-Anal...</a> and the What Works Clearinghouse have summaries of the evidence for different strategies for improving early reading skills: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ies.ed.gov&#x2F;ncee&#x2F;wwc&#x2F;practiceguide&#x2F;14" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ies.ed.gov&#x2F;ncee&#x2F;wwc&#x2F;practiceguide&#x2F;14</a> Direct Instruction (also championed by one political side) is not an effective strategy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ies.ed.gov&#x2F;ncee&#x2F;wwc&#x2F;EvidenceSnapshot&#x2F;139" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ies.ed.gov&#x2F;ncee&#x2F;wwc&#x2F;EvidenceSnapshot&#x2F;139</a><p>Here&#x27;s just one post with a little more info on the political context: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radicalscholarship.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;does-the-science-of-reading-fulfill-social-justice-equity-goals-in-education&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radicalscholarship.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;does-the-science-o...</a><p>A bigger scandal is how states like Florida game the system to make their reading score rankings look higher: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tampabay.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;floridas-education-system-is-vastly-underperforming-column&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tampabay.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;floridas-educati...</a><p>The good news is there are a lot of strategies that help with reading in various contexts. There&#x27;s even research on how reading to dogs (or even robots) helps students with reading :)

I can&#x27;t help but think of my youngest son. He&#x27;s been having language development problems his whole life; barely spoke at 3. He got help, and he quickly become a very adept speaker, using complex sentence structures, though he does have a bit of a speech impediment. I already expected him to have trouble learning to read, and he did. It was hard, he hated it, and we received a lot of help with it.<p>One thing that struck me from this story is kids only wanting to read books they already know. My son was like that. He loves Dr Seuss books and has read the easier ones a dozen times, so he always proposes to read that instead of the new book we&#x27;re trying to read.<p>Still, he reads a lot better now than some of the kids in the story. He&#x27;s starting to pick up on random texts he runs into, reading subtitles (he&#x27;s too slow though), so there&#x27;s definitely progress. He&#x27;s 8, which I think corresponds to grade 3 in the US system? He&#x27;s about a year behind in reading, so if American kids a year older than that read worse than he does, that&#x27;s not good.<p>Though I do wonder if &quot;sounding out&quot; words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages...

One reason for teaching so long using a failed method is public school teachers are not accountable for failure. There is zero downside for them failing (they just blame the parents) and no incentive whatsoever to do better.<p>The fix is simple. Give teachers a $1000 bonus for every student of theirs that performs at grade level at the end of the year.<p>It&#x27;ll be the cheapest, most effective way to improve kids&#x27; education.

I&#x27;m by no means a perfect dad, but one thing I&#x27;ve done well is reading to my kinds. In the past 14 years, I&#x27;ve read to my kids almost every night. They both tested in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension and vocabulary. I&#x27;d often be shocked when I&#x27;d read a complicated word and ask my 5th grade what it meant and she&#x27;d give me a great definition.<p>Read to your kids.

Can someone please summarize what is this wrong methodology about?

I have a young cousin, he&#x27;s recently had his sixth birthday. Reading is completely novel for him. He loves it. Even though he doesn&#x27;t fully understand the words, he will point to letters and sound them, then he will read the full word aloud. It is an almost majestic thing to witness; he is so pleased with himself when he gets the words right. He was reading everything he could find that had letters in my house.<p>Let&#x27;s put him down for a future bookworm? Anecdote as it may be, it is evidence that phonics is the natural way to go. I don&#x27;t think he&#x27;d have the same joy if I pointed to the words and said &#x27;that shape means blue&#x27; or whatever.<p>Discovering the underlying logic then making it your own is what makes learning anything a pleasure. Indeed, how many of us on this forum would enjoy learning to program were it taught the same way?

From the podcast:<p>&quot;Here’s what’s happening to many children in this country. They go to a “balanced literacy” school that uses Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins. They’re taught the cueing strategies. Their reading ability is measured using leveled books. If they’re struggling – and someone notices – they might get Reading Recovery in first grade, where they get cueing and leveled books. And if they’re still struggling after that, many of them get Leveled Literacy Intervention. More cueing. More leveled books.<p>Struggling readers keep getting more of the same.<p>That’s what happened to Matthew. Missy’s son. In Gwinnett County, Georgia. She and her husband ended up hiring a private tutor to help Matthew. She remembers calling the tutor.<p>Purcell: And she was like, “You finally arrived at the place where most of us arrive.” She had given up on the idea that the school was going to teach her son how to read. And she’d decided she was going to have to take care of the problem herself. It’s what Corinne Adams did with her son Charlie. It’s what Lee Gaul did in New York City with his daughter Zoe. It’s what Kenni Alden in California wishes she had done with her son.<p>Missy says the private tutoring helped Matthew. But she felt like the balanced literacy instruction he was getting at school was undercutting what he was learning from his tutor. His tutor was teaching him how to decode words. At school he was being taught the cueing system. So last year she and her husband pulled him out of public school, and they put him in a private school for kids with dyslexia.<p>Matthew’s in sixth grade now. And Missy says he’s doing really well. After just one year at the private school, she says he was almost up to grade level in reading and writing.<p>For Missy, what’s especially painful about all this is that she had been a teacher. She advocated for Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell in her school district. She taught other teachers how to do balanced literacy with the cueing and the leveled books.&quot;

The fact that the education system managed to forget how to teach kids <i>how to read</i> is unbelievably infuriating. I have been guilty in the past of rolling my eyes at “teachers are heroes, teachers should be paid like rockstars”. I don’t feel guilty anymore!

A couple of thoughts form my own anecdotal evidence:<p>* My mother was a stay-at-home mom and some of the earliest memories I have is her teaching me to read.<p>* I had difficulty in school and I did not fit in. My social issues spilled into the classroom, my grades suffered, i was picked on a lot, and I was usually put in remedial classes (you know those smaller classes with like 5 students). Yet I got a 1460 on my SATs, +700 on SATIIs, and went to USNews top 25 college (~20% acceptance rate at the time, ~12% now).<p>I have gotten more social since, but it left me with the impression that public school can do more harm than good. I am pro school choice and will seriously consider homeschooling.

On the final episode, something that kind of bothers me here is the generally antagonistic attitude towards the &quot;get kids excited about reading&quot; approach. The whole series focuses on the struggling students who were wronged by misguided one-size-fits-all teaching, and then the narrator goes on to assert that students don&#x27;t need to be sold the joys of reading because, &quot;look at these sound bites of kids learning to read - they sure seem excited to me!&quot; Kind of annoying to see someone so dismissive of the notion after spending four hours talking about how not all kids pick things up through osmosis.

I guess you guys in the US could try curriculums from other English speaking countries ?

The UK faced the same challenge but has mostly ensured that now synthetic phonics is the standard method of instruction. The success of this programme has really been down to a single key politician in the Department for Education, Nick Gibb. He&#x27;s never had a cabinet role so didn&#x27;t get deeply caught up in reshuffles, and for most of the past 13 years he&#x27;s been the Schools Minister. The TES ran a profile of him and his phonics drive recently, a good followup to the Sold a Story series: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;ee9LA" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;ee9LA</a>

Just wait until you get to the part in the podcast where the teacher intentionally covers up a word with a post-it note and then asks the kids to read it. Apparently, they are supposed to figure out the word from the context.

This is horrifying. If I understood this correctly, they are being taught effectively *next token prediction* instead of reading.<p>The only children that will learn to read will probably be in spite of this system.

I think if you did a study of Agile vs Waterfall and then took out all the nuance and then wrote an angry podcast about one side or the other it would be somewhat equivalent to this. i.e. reducing complex things (like project managment or teaching) to &#x27;this way is wrong other way is right&#x27;. The skills&#x2F;experience of the teachers&#x2F;project managers are probably the biggest factor

I heard of this story years ago, and was very dismayed. (There is no date on this website is this something new?)<p>however the last 2 years I&#x27;ve experienced kids being taught to read in US public school kindergarten and the curriculum was nothing like was described in this series. They were taught phonics and memorized common non-phonetic words the same way I was taught 30 years ago.

A book I bought (its name escapes me ATM) said, make word-only flash cards (no pix needed) of things your kid can directly relate to. Like body parts. Then colors and numbers.<p>It seemed to work. We could play a &quot;body parts game&quot; where I shuffle the deck and we go thru it one at a time: he points to the part I name... and gradually he took over reading them.

If you have a 3-4 year old: Bob Books

This was aired on my local NPR station a couple of months ago. It&#x27;s pretty interesting stuff.

&quot;Why Johnny Can&#x27;t Read&quot; from 1954 is as fresh as ever.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0060913401" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0060913...</a>

The Right to Read movie talks about this very topic, and features the author of this podcast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.therighttoreadfilm.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.therighttoreadfilm.org&#x2F;</a>

They broke training fresh neural networks for people while AI training gets the most careful and best supported and financed training. Which is already going exponential. What could go wrong?

On a book suggestion subreddit that I follow there are way too many queries of the form &quot;I&#x27;ve never read a book, can you recommend one to start with?&quot;

This is one of the most shocking things I have heard about in ages.<p>Because kids can&#x27;t vote and don&#x27;t have money they really do seem to get shafted in the US.

We&#x27;ve been teaching kids to read for 200 years so why does anything need to be changed? Invest in more teachers not new fancy methods.

Teaching a kid to read is about <i>spending time with your kids</i> seriously.<p>It&#x27;s parent child bonding<p>Read to your kids as much as possible

Bob The Builder got my child started.<p>I didn&#x27;t read to her most nights, btw. I told her a multi-year bedtime story instead.

People are different. Phonics helped my sister. I had no use for them. We both know how to read.

So, Americans decided to make their language as difficult to read as Chinese?!? Well done...

Can anyone suggest better materials &#x2F; guides for early literacy development?

TLDR: Adults don&#x27;t like the sound of children sounding out words slowly and would prefer not to have to listen to it.<p>The old way of getting around this was having kids memorize whole words.<p>That never really worked, so the new technique is to teach them several different strategies to guess what it is they are reading.<p>It turns out (no duh) that doesn&#x27;t work either, but it <i>does</i> mask the signs of illiteracy, so that intervention ends up coming later.

as a non-native english speaker. i don&#x27;t understand and can&#x27;t relate at all.

China has a 99.7% youth literacy rate - isn&#x27;t that enough proof in regards to which method works best?

Again from the podcast:<p>&quot;This is Sarah Gannon. She’s a teacher you met in Episode 3. She trusted Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins<p>Gannon: I trusted that they’re experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading. She believed in the cueing and the leveled books. The first time she encountered criticism of that approach was in 2019, after one of my articles came out.<p>Gannon: Teacher friends were like, “Did you read this Emily Hanford? And I was like, “I read it.” And we were like, “What is she talking about?” She was outraged. Because a journalist was questioning the way she taught reading.<p>And then, her daughter, Maeve.<p>(Music) Maeve wasn’t learning how to read. Sarah tried to teach her. But it wasn’t working. So Sarah went looking for answers. And discovered the research.<p>Gannon: I changed because I had to. There was no choice. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing with Maeve. The same thing happened to Carrie Chee. She was one of the Lucy Calkins fans you met in an earlier episode. The one who didn’t like George Bush.<p>One day, when Carrie’s daughter was in elementary school, she came to her mother and she said, “I have something to tell you.”<p>Carrie Chee: My child looked at me and she was really nervous and anxious, and she just says, “I can’t read.” The school hadn’t said there was a problem. Carrie hadn’t noticed a problem either. But her daughter knew.<p>Chee: She knew. They know. You know, the kids know first. The parents know second. The teacher chimes in third. And then, you know, the hunt is on for help. Some kids try to keep it a secret when they’re struggling. They can look like they’re reading for a while. But as the words get longer and the pictures go away, it all kind of falls apart.<p>(Music ends) Carrie Chee was a 7th grade English teacher before she had her daughter. She says she always had struggling readers in her class. A lot of them. And the only thing she knew to do was to try to find them books about things they were interested in.<p>Chee: And I just kept saying, “Well keep trying.” And then when they couldn&#x27;t, I just thought they didn&#x27;t want to try. And what I’m haunted by is, when it wasn’t working, I blamed it on children. Carrie Chee isn’t sure she would have learned anything about the science of reading if it weren’t for her experience with her own child. Sarah Gannon too. If everything had been fine with her daughter, she thinks she might still be dismissing all of this science of reading stuff.<p>Gannon: I don’t know if I could be convinced and that’s what worries me. You know, I have good friends who are very smart, incredibly talented educators who, it’s just like, hold fast to old beliefs. And I think, I, honestly, I think I would be one of them. You know. But I guess you have to say, like, it’s OK to be wrong. Like, I was wrong.&quot;<p>How many of their students have been irreparably damaged from their incompetence and unprofessionalism. It took for their family to be personally impacted that they actually looked into the research. If a doctor gave medicine that had terrible consequences without looking into it what would happen? Or an engineer who didn&#x27;t look into the structural properties of a material and a bridge collapsed what would happen? What has happened to these educators, and those who advocated for this practices?

Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong?<p>(I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)