Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 29: Memo To Teachers: Please Come Back To Real Reading (Jan 19, 2022)

January 19, 2022 Bruce Deitrick Price
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 29: Memo To Teachers: Please Come Back To Real Reading (Jan 19, 2022)
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Show Notes Transcript

Episode 29:  Memo To Teachers: Please Come Back To Real Reading  (Jan 19, 2022)

In this podcast I mention three reading reformers who specialize in helping teachers. Pick one and let that person’s ideas be your guide for a few weeks. If you think the advice is not perfect, go to the next person. 

Remember that the advice you will get in the school from official experts is probably worthless. But typically teachers have been indoctrinated in ed school so they're very reluctant to step away from that bad advice. Now is a good time to do just that.


Meet three reading experts:

Nora Chahbazi Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction / EBLI

Emily Hanford, The Science of Reading

Denise Eide, The Logic of English

You'll find a lot of information on the Internet about all of them. Please do your own research.








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Memo To Teachers: Please Come Back To Real Reading  (Jan. 19, 2022)

I've been writing about the literacy crisis is this country for 20 years. It's very frustrating because for me  the educational malpractice is obvious. You can't teach children to read by making them memorize sight-words one at a time for many years. It just does not work. 

Today I'm going to introduce you to three reformers focused on reading. These are very serious people, and very benevolent. That's what you won't find in our Education Establishment. My impression is that they are playing games and they are malevolent

Here's the background of the story. Starting in 1931, the Education Establishment unleashed Look-Say upon the children of the United States. The result was a rising tide of illiteracy. The number of functional illiterates now exceeds 40,000,000.

The so-called “educators" who engineered this decline have shown a demonic cleverness in attacking the common sense of phonics, while piling up silly sophistries that supposedly justify the hoax of  Whole Word or Sight-Words. It is against this backdrop that Denise Eide — E-I-D-E — wrote her book “Uncovering the Logic of English.” 

Eide, our expert one, quantifies our unnecessary crisis: “The statistics are both numbing and consistent. 32% of fourth graders read well, 34% test below proficiency, and 34% cannot read. Every time I meet an elementary school teacher, I ask if this reflects their experience. They all say it does.”  

Eide is confident “that we can teach reading at a fraction of the cost, and with much higher success rates, than we currently do. To do so, it is essential that all students, all teachers, and all parents know the logic of English. The knowledge in her book is as basic to academic success as 1 + 1 = 2.”

The second expert is Nora Chahbazi who created an approach called Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction or E-B-L-I. She was inspired by the painful experiences her daughter had in second grade. The daughter wasn't learning to read and the teacher seemed to think that was fine.

The third reformer has made a big impact in the last several years. This is Emily Hanford. She had an article in the New York Times about the science of reading. That's a good place to start for an introduction to the modern malaise.

I'm sure the three crusaders have small differences of opinion but they are all  promote phonics..  They work with teachers a lot so they're very  understanding of the typical problems. Pick one of them and let her be your guide out of the swamp.

Personally, I believe many people do learn to read with Sight-Words but only in the sense that they use them as a stepping stone, finally seeing the phonics inside the Sight-Words. But probably not even one person in 100 or much more has such a retentive memory that they can actually memorize many thousands of Sight-Words, and recall them instantly. In short, virtually all the success that Sight-Word experts claim is really an illusion, a fraud. 

I would argue that Sight-Words are not only useless but destructive to the brain, and should not be considered an option. Here is the true choice: intensive phonics, as outlined in Eide’s prescription, or a more literary approach that emphasizes nursery rhymes, singing, sharing stories, etc. Many people learn to read almost spontaneously, just as musical people sing or play piano with little instruction. I published almost a million words without knowing a single phonics rule. As I’ve learned in dozens of anecdotes, the more verbal kids “figure it out.” Remember that first-graders show up at school already recognizing 20,000 spoken words; they speak English words all day. The leap to reading these words is NOT so great as the Education Establishment likes to pretend when concocting excuses for its own dismal failures. 

The slower, less verbal kids -- the very ones you think would have the most trouble learning the phonics rules -- are precisely those children who most desperately need the phonics rules. The Whole Word charlatans always used the slower students as their alibi. Oh, we wouldn’t want to abuse these poor darlings with low verbal skills. How could they possibly memorize 100 phonics rules? So the  answer is we must make them memorize 10,000 English word-diagrams??? But those slower children -- around whom the entire scam has been constructed--never advance very far in the program. They become functional illiterates.

Whole Word, in operation, functions as a Ponzi scheme. The child learns to read a few hundred words, and is soon able to “read” small books with controlled vocabularies. That apparent success keeps the parents quiet. Here’s why I say Whole Word is a Ponzi scheme: the early success is actually a lie, and is paid for many times over by years of failure. Trying to learn new words finally blocks the words you thought were successfully learned. Meanwhile, the phonics kids who start slow and shaky, end up reading at extraordinary speeds in a year or two.

Joan Dunn, a teacher, wrote in 1954 what I now believe to be the most profound truth about education:  “The children...want to be taught step by step, so that they can see their progress. The duller they are, the more important and immediate is this need.”

The kids are begging to be taught correctly. When you won't teach them the essential facts they need to know, they are miserable and unsuccessful. It is the job of every school teacher to rescue the children of America from this kind of abuse.

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Meet three reading experts:

Nora Chahbazi Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction / EBLI

Emily Hanford, The Science of Reading

Denise Eide, The Logic of English

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podcast by Bruce Deitrick Price
Good background article: The War Against Children

#Literacy,  #sight-words,  #phonics,  #alphabet,  #dyslexia,  #comprehension,  #dumbing down,