Writes the Editorial Board of The Washington Post, in "Holding kids back can’t explain Mississippi’s education ‘miracle.'"
The editorial refers to "the science of reading" but doesn't mention phonics, and yet, right in the middle of it, there's a link to WaPo Editorial Board opinion from last March: "Cut the politics. Phonics is the best way to teach reading."
What's the evidence that Mississippi is looking at retention as a "magic solution"? Isn't it obvious that a strict retention rule lights a fire under everyone to strive very hard to save children from getting held back?
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92 comments:
I invite WaPo to come here to California to pretend to dissect how things have gone to shit in public-school classrooms. The "yeah, but"s will be epic.
What is retention but a quality check and rework. The Editorial Board of The Washington Post wants retention on every product offered in the marketplace. They want retention on every civil construction project in relation to environmental impact. Heck, they even want retention on GOP candidates for the presidency of the US.
They just don't want a quality check and rework on children in relation to reading, if it is the "wrong" people doing the quality check.
The irrational fruit of being driving by pride, one manifestation of which is the insatiable lust for your "side" to be right and the other "side" to be wrong in all things.
From homeschooling our boys, and seeing lots of other homeschoolers and from previous experience in school, it is ‘obvious’ that everyone doesn’t progress in certain intellectual leaps at the same pace (though math / abstract reasoning seems more obvious to a lot of people). And even if they did, we cohort children by a cutoff date for each years, so children 364 days in age different are in the same grade. Can we see the age in grade of the held back? I’d hypothesize they are skew on the younger half of the kids in the 3rd grade.
It is pretty well understood that is true in athletics (holding back a kid helps ALL future development as being a bit bigger and stronger earlier gets more training and experience to maintain the advantage, though I think it is more ‘normal’ in Canada hocky to arrange things so the kid is the oldest in the class.
There is no limit to the tax dollars modern America will spend, and curriculum rewrites it will undertake, to avoid admitting the problem is the rise in children arriving at school unprepared to learn.
AKA, the rise in single-parent homes. AKA, the parent shortage.
We've been playing this game for at least 40 years, and not one seems inclined to stop.
When I taught middle school we had parents come to the school and beg us to retain their children and the school refused. Every year we would send dozens of kids to the high school that had not passed a single class in three years and were far below state standards. Those kids then fail half their classes in 9th grade and spend the next three years either trying to catch up or continuing to fail.
to leftists, isn't The Real Problem.. That blacks are starting to learn to read and write?
HOW can they expect democrat support, from blacks that can read and write?
Imus used to say that he was 66 but read at a 68 year old level.
It is well known in the teaching profession that holding students to a high standard actually results in students trying harder and succeeding more. Miraculously it also frees up teachers and teaching assistants to spend more time helping the students that actually need it. I can't read the WP so can anyone confirm MS is using phonics?
So important to get those basic skills. Because otherwise the students feel the need to be disruptive when they get into later years. The stigma of being held back in third grade is nothing compared to the stigma of being in high school and being unable to read. I’ve seen that firsthand working as a substitute teacher and seeing who attempts to keep everyone else from learning versus the students who actually are eager to learn.
At the present time half of the students graduated from public high schools in the state of California are unable to read or do math at a basic level despite the millions of dollars spent on education.
So it actually takes focus and purpose to help students that are below the curve. THIS. Forget all the DEI bullcrap. All that is trying to fix a problem at a point it is too late to solve. It virtual signaling is easy. Teaching 3rd graders to read is hard. But it is the real answer because they will then be able to achieve on their own.
This program can’t be allowed to succeed thought. That would disrupt the teachers union gravy train.
Seems to me that some European countries used the same basic rule. Can’t remember which ones + google acting funky this morning.
Thurber says it's the fourth grade where everybody gets stuck, owing to fractions and long division. The oldest boy is Sullivant 4th grade was 22.
Isn't it obvious …
Not to your Lefty buddies, no.
If a student cannot read at a grade-appropriate level then he or she is only being set up to fall ever further behind in the higher grades as the emphasis on doing homework grows greater. This should be obvious for anyone who tries to argue for social promotions.
At any rate now we now know why the black-white achievement gap is so much worse for Wisconsin than for Mississippi. In Mississippi they care.
It is almost as if progressives don't believe incentives matter at all.
I graduated high school with several people who literally could not read "See Spot Run". This was the 1970s and 1980s, so even then social promotion was already becoming the norm.
You have to have a retention policy because children won't ever have a chance to catch up without it. You can't have teachers in the 4th grade and beyond responsible for teaching their students to read. By the 4th grade, every student should be able to read and must be able to read for any other subject to learnable beyond that level.
"Isn't it obvious that a strict retention rule lights a fire under everyone to strive very hard to save children from getting held back?"
The left doesn't do obvious. Seriously, they think everything is nuanced. I believe it's why they get so much wrong.
There must be something can be done…
Speaking of retention, I had a 2nd grade classmate in '49 who was held back. Back then there were no ancillary grifters like the tutor/coaches mentioned in article. That said, he then went on to be a very successful dentist in Seattle.
We made sure our kids could read before starting school. Caused its own set of problems with boredom. We used to get calls from our son’s first grade teacher that he was hiding books on his lap and reading for his own enjoyment instead of doing assigned work. He seemed to not be challenged by finding the missing letter in “m_p”. Next to a picture of a mop.
"Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t"
Good for Mississippi. The hell-hole blue cities should take note.
The common trend of promoting kids to the next grade when they can't perform at their current grade level has proved a recipe for disaster. For all the talk about college admissions and related issues, the poor performance of pre-K to grade 12 education is far more important. The US spends vast amounts of money on K-12 education, and we aren't getting much to show for it.
The Leftist education establishment has to admit that Mississippi - of all states - did something that worked. But no other state will follow the lead of MI.
In Omaha, many of the public high schools have only 20% of the students who can read proficiently. 20%! That means 80% are failing. But the unions don't want to hear that.
Some kids are motivated to try and be the best at subjects in school, some are motivated to do enough to get by. I'm guessing the overwhelming majority of kids who don't read well are in the latter group. Facing the very serious of consequence of being held back a year, seems like it would be a good motivator for those children and the adults around that child to get some progress in reading.
Imus used to say that he was 66 but read at a 68 year old level.
66 W ENNNNNNN BC
The common trend of promoting kids to the next grade when they can't perform at their current grade level has proved a recipe for disaster.
One of the things that stunned me when I finally started teaching at a high school is that social promote kids today. We have kids fail every class as a Freshman and receive Sophomore classes the next year and be officially labeled a sophomore. I have "seniors" who haven't passed a class in three years.
The experts are too stupid to understand incentives?
Retention carries a stigma. no 7 year old(and their family)wants to take a grade over.It happened a couple of times to kids when I was in elementary school. My recollection is they were a much better student for the rest of their eduction.
Incentives are positive and negative. Humans, (All life, even a tape worm will avoid heat) respond to incentives. That professional educators refuse to accept this simple truth is a clue about the terrible performance of the educational infrastructure(no surprise, run exclusively by leftist ideology).
What ever happened to summer school? phonics is not hard to teach or learn. There are way more grand parents out there than kids that need a boost. Hook them up.
Blogger Yancey Ward said...
"It is almost as if progressives don't believe incentives matter at all."
I have believed for a long time that the one trait which most explains lefties is an unwillingness/inability to accept/understand that people respond to incentives.
"[But i]t is impossible to disentangle retention itself from all that comes with it... after-class tutoring, for example, or specialized instruction during the school day... "
You do it ALL, because a) we are not smart enough to untangle all that, b) not every kid is the same, and c) the children at risk NOW don't have time for you to get your shit together.
'We made sure our kids could read before starting school.'
As a kid, we had library night. Every Tuesday for years.
Don't rely on teachers and schools alone...
AKA, the rise in single-parent homes. AKA, the parent shortage.
Actually, more accurate to say single mom parent homes.
Government "safety nets", drove fathers from the home. Four generations later, feral minor boys roaming the streets committing crimes, has the experts wondering how this came to be?
I'll leave with this thought.
My betters have explained to me that corporation board rooms require half male and half female members to function properly. (but a home does not)
The US spends vast amounts of money on K-12 education, and we aren't getting much to show for it.
We spend a bunch of money on pre-K too. Headstart has proven to be completely ineffective, but we keep funding the program anyway. One big area of wasteful spending is professional development. Millions at every school in the country, paying consultants to teach us the next new thing, and there's always a new thing. The consultants get rich, the schools brag their developing their teachers, and the teachers are bored and missing a day of instruction.
We need to go back to the curriculum of the 1950's. (Many English teachers today don't know how to diagram a sentence)
It worked for Joe. He's President now.
The Washington Post Editorial Board seeks to hold Mississippi to a standard of proof the Washington Post editors would immediately reject if that standard were to be applied to their activities, such as prove the Washington Post has not promulgated malicious lies about Donald Trump.
Requiring a proof of efficacy in education calls for experiments performed on children that a non-fascist would consider fetched from the mind of SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele. Take any randomly selected group of Mississippi pre-schoolers and educate them using the same materials and methods including phonics, but do not deny them special attention if specifically requested. Furthermore, none of the children are denied promotion for any reason. All are to progress through grade levels K through 12 one level per academic year unconditionally. At the end of the 12th year, administer a standardized achievement test and compare the normalized results to the general Mississippi 12th-grade class.
That comparison would be interesting and ought to satisfy the WaPo Editorial Board, assuming the members are intellectually honest, an assumption not yet tested by the standards the WaPo Editorial Board could not tolerate being applied to itself. Unfortunately, such an experiment would exact a dreadful cost on the lives and prospects of its apparati, but that never held back a progressive social initiative in the past.
It is a regrettable fact that many parents are functionally indifferent to their children's education. They compare their children's accomplishments and academic skills to their own woeful ignorance and incompetence. They do not admire the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. Instead, they admire and lust after material goods they perceive as prestigious -- expensive trainers, cars, jewelry. When the little chap has reached 18, if he's got a nice car and some bling, then he's fine. The fact he can't read is to them irrelevant. Then there are other more well-meaning parents and responsible caregivers with a genuine but ill-informed concern for their charges' education who take promotion as indicative of academic progress, which isn't true wherever the NEA holds sway over the policies decreed by local school boards.
"But no other state will follow the lead of MI."
Or MS.
I scoff at the "whole word" BS that is often used as an attempt to teach reading as if we used cuneiform for our written language.
Phonics is one great way to learn reading of English. And if anything has been proven better through rigorous testing as a way to learn to read, use that also.
"There must be something can be done…"
Well, sure. More administrators and DEI + CRT indoctrination. That'll solve the problem. You know... finding non-demanding jobs for more education majors.
You mean phonics? Sounding out letters? The way people have learned to read forever? The genius of an alphabet lies in the fact that once its sounds are mastered, we can read anything.
Imagine having to memorize a thousand pictographs just to read on a lower grade-school level. That we ever stopped teaching phonics and instead relied in showing pictures to kids is mind-boggling—especially since English is so rich in near-synonyms. (There are no true synonyms.)
We can thank Teachers College and inane education gurus for this debacle.
The pity is that having been taught badly themselves, today's teachers will have to learn the phonics they should have mastered by the age of eight.
It's not that those of us who learned to read by sounding out letters never mispronounced words in our heads or always knew what they meant. That came the more we read and the more we listened to the grownups around us speak.
Of course, those who grow up around people whose pastimes do not include coherent conversation are at a disadvantage.
serious question:
IF you're Not smart enough to be able to do 3rd grade work.. HOW are you going to do 4th grade work?
public schools get paid, per child per day attended..
change that to per child able to do course work, and watch teaching methods change
As P. J. O'Rourke famously said:
Anyone that doesn't understand the failure of the education system has obviously never fucked an El Ed major
“The left doesn't do obvious. Seriously, they think everything is nuanced. I believe it's why they get so much wrong.”
Or they treat the obvious as nuance.
Hopefully parents are finally responding to how the left is running public education.
https://hotair.com/headlines/2023/09/11/dont-look-now-but-conservatives-are-scoring-big-school-choice-wins-in-biden-era-n577288>conservatives are scoring big school-choice wins in Biden era
Maybe we'll see if even lefties respond to incentives.
Althouse writes, "The editorial refers to 'the science of reading'..."
Althouse is rhetorically correct to use quotation marks here, scare quotes I assume. Reading is a skill that all humans of normal intelligence can acquire with remarkably little outside effort, it's not a science. (Liberals love to apply the word science where it is logically inappropriate. They think it dignifies their particular bailiwick above mere skills. The hoi polloi have skills. Aristocats are scientists. They play fast and loose with art, as well. Every fucking progressive you'll ever meet includes artist in its litany of self-approbation.)
There are indeed profound and unanswered scientific questions about reading, but these belong to the fields of archeology, physical anthropology, and neuropsychology. The science of reading is an utterly vacuous concept. Readers aren't doing science when they read, they are applying a learned skill to a remarkable and mysterious invention called writing, which appeared in many different forms in many geographically remote regions of human habitation at approximately the same instant of prehistory some 6000 years before the present. There are many hypotheses related to the phenomenon of writing, though its near simultaneity over a wide expense of the globe suggests evolutionary neuropsychology played a role.
Some researchers claim that apes can be taught a skill that amounts to a very rudimentary form of reading using abstract symbols and gestures, suggesting the germ of language existed in our very distant evolutionary forebears. However, the Clever Hans phenomenon has not been definitively ruled out. The mystery persists.
"Isn't it obvious that a strict retention rule lights a fire under everyone to strive very hard to save children from getting held back?"
Shout it from the rooftops. The alternative is what we had when I was a teacher in a middle class Massachusetts school system. No one was ever held back because that would be awful. Regarding kids who were way below grade level in literacy or math, the elementary teachers said, "They'll fix it in middle school" and the middle school teachers said, "They'll fix it in high school."
It worked for Joe. He's President now.
I don't think it's out of order to demand America's third graders can read a teleprompter as well as this President.
[But i]t is impossible to disentangle retention itself from all that comes with it...
Exactly. When there was no retention, there was nothing coming along with it.
BTW, I think the opposite should also be true. If you can finish third grade by, say November, you can just start working on the fourth grade material. If you're done with high school at 14, just move on to college.
I mean, how many kids have long since mastered the material and are sitting in class for months waiting for the school year to end?
Wild Chicken.
Thanks for the correction.
MI is Michigan. And the unions are too strong there to do anything like what MS did.
The point is not that Mississippi is treating it as a magic bullet--in fact, the main point of the piece is that they are *not* treating it as a magic bullet and that that is likely why it is working. The point is that others should not regard it as magic bullet.
Promoting students who can't read is sentencing them for life to never being able to function in middle class society.
rhhardin: "Thurber says it's the fourth grade where everybody gets stuck, owing to fractions and long division."
In 4th grade we had Sister Louis - aka Sister Joe Louis. If you couldn't multiply two fractions, you'd be kneeling on your knuckles.
"...What's the evidence that Mississippi is looking at retention as a "magic solution"? Isn't it obvious that a strict retention rule lights a fire under everyone to strive very hard to save children from getting held back?"
With some reluctance I am going to report you, Ann, to the Internet Board of Comment Niceness. Your criticism is just a bit too savage. WaPo means well; and it is struggling to deal with this very alien reality, where incentives matter and can lead to success.
Democrats don't really care about educating children to get high paying jobs.
They only care about keeping people in poverty because that's a guarantee that those people will vote Democratic. (Because they are either unemployed or have very low paying jobs and are trained to blame Republicans and corporate America for their failures.)
The Democratic politicians have a lot of people to keep on the gravy train.
Bing chat tells us ...
Reasons a student could be struggling to learn to read include:
Child’s socio-economic background
Physical abnormalities
Mental and psychological imbalance
Interest of the child
Familiarity with symbols
Teacher’ ability to help children to learn
Parents with histories of reading difficulties
Diagnosed with a specific language impairment or a hearing impairment
Gained less knowledge or skills related to literacy during preschool years
Limited experience with books
Speech and hearing problems
Poor phonemic awareness
Limited English language skills
Limited access to books
School’s ability to meet each student’s reading challenges
I'm sure that repeating a grade helps some students but certainly not all students.
mikee writes, "I scoff at the "whole word" BS that is often used as an attempt to teach reading as if we used cuneiform for our written language."
I agree, whole-word is bullshit. However, its bovine fecality extends far beyond the languages expressed in alphabetic scripts. Every written language known contains phonetic elements, including Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan, and Chinese, and even Mycenaean Linear B. No literate person in any of those cultures could read using a whole-word approach exclusively.
I had a student in one of my classes who was a Philadelphia teacher. She was studying for her MBA because she had enough of pretending to teach in Philadelphia. She taught 8th grade math.
She said that her typical student entering 8th grade was performing at a 4th grade level.
Philadelphia had a policy that said that if a student entered a tutoring program (key word being “entered”) she was not permitted to flunk the student no matter how bad his actual performance. Even if they only attended one tutoring session and never showed up in her class again. Which was exactly what many did.
WaPo believes that progress (i.e. monotonic process) implies achievement.
Everybody (i.e. parents) likes school choice except the Democrats and unions.
Instead of worrying about racism, maybe you should worry about slack-ass teachers indoctrinating children to believe the world will end in a few years. Thanks for your dystopian fantasies, how about adding some science and math?
The Washington Post is a partisan organization. They don't really care about anything other than how it impacts the chances of the Democrats holding power and how it benefits the Democratic Party constituencies, of which they happen to be one of them. They are still pretending, much as the New York Times pretends, that they are a useful non-partisan source for news. No one believes this other than the marks.
The problem with the educational system was and is the incentives. When the educational system is failing, which it often is, outside forces will try to provide some accountability, but this accountability is almost always corrupted. Introduce standardized testing? Make the tests easier. Claim the tests are racist and make changes that stop measuring what is supposed to be measured. Cheat. Manipulate the statistics to lie. Then claim success and demand higher pay, despite actually doing worse than originally. This eventually culminates with teachers, who in some situations literally admit that their efforts provide zero added value, demand that (a) it is not their fault that they are useless (both dubious and irrelevant) and (b) they are underpaid and need a raise.
I do not necessarily recommend holding back students for underperformance in all cases, but if the student cannot pass basic minimal requirements for a most fundamental and vital skill such as reading, and you have a system to try to fix this other than holding them back and hoping for the best, then that sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
"literacy coaches have been painstakingly selected, trained and monitored by the state and dispatched to perform one job: supporting teachers as they learn, and learn to teach, the science of reading....".
I sure hope all that fluff does not take away from Equity training.
"We made sure our kids could read before starting school. Caused its own set of problems with boredom. We used to get calls from our son’s first grade teacher that he was hiding books on his lap and reading for his own enjoyment instead of doing assigned work. He seemed to not be challenged by finding the missing letter in “m_p”. Next to a picture of a mop."
I had that problem as well. My parents would get notes saying "C refuses to stop reading in class". Well, it was math or science class and I had already finished my entire week's worth of worksheets, so I pulled my Nancy Drew mystery out of my bag and read until the end of class. I had to find out if she had solved the mystery of the purloined pearls. The teachers hated that! But, although my family were poor as church mice, books were always available, handed down, and cherished. We all knew how to read before entering school for first grade. I was shocked that other children did read in their "free" time as well. They missed so many adventures! I passed that love of reading on to my children and soon it was my turn to get the notes. "Your child refuses to stop reading in class!"
…”And even if they did, we cohort children by a cutoff date for each years, so children 364 days in age different are in the same grade. Can we see the age in grade of the held back? I’d hypothesize they are skew on the younger half of the kids in the 3rd grade.”
Received knowledge back when many of us were growing up was that if a kid were near the line, and alleles equal, then push up the girls, and hold back the boys. So, my 4th brother, born in Nov, was in the same grade all the way through with a neighbor girl born almost exactly a year later.
Would it be possible for the WaPo Editorial Board to write anything about Mississippi, without it dripping with condescension and disapproval?
Why not simply celebrate an accomplishment that has evaded the far better paid 'teachers' of DC and its environs?
Or would that too deeply offend the teacher union poobahs?
The "science of reading" refers to the cognitive science research on how children learn to read. Some learn with little or no instruction. Most need systematic, explicit instruction in "phonemic awareness" and phonics as the first step in learning to read. (Nobody thinks it's the only step.)
Mississippi did a lot of things to improve reading, including teaching phonics systematically and retaining poor readers in third grade (it is a motivator for kids and adults) and lots of coaching for teachers and tutoring and more. The "miracle" is not a product of phonics alone or retention alone or teacher coaching alone.
Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, gave $100 million to form the Barksdale Reading Institute, which partnered with the state ed department to develop the reading initiative. He deserves a lot of credit.
“public schools get paid, per child per day attended..
change that to per child able to do course work, and watch teaching methods change”
Worse, in PHX 20 years ago, the public schools were paid for how many kids they had on 10/1 every year, so October was the month every year when they would dump maybe 10% of their HS students. Retention would likely have soared if the schools had been paid by the month, per student, and not per year. My secretary had all 3 of her kids thrown out of HS in October. First two were boys, and just weren’t making it. 2nd was dyslexic, and received no help. Girl was very bright, but a discipline problem. She was thrown out her Jr year, and had her GED by Thanksgiving.
The other thing that drove my Secretary crazy about the public school system was that the teachers all seemed to think that they knew what was best for the students. They were the experts, and were so much better credentialed. She knew what was wrong with each of her kids (like the 2nd boy being dyslexic), but they weren’t going to listen to a parent who didn’t even have a college degree. The reality, of course, is that the average IQ of a school teacher with an advanced college degree is roughly that of the population mean. That means that maybe half the parents are smarter than the average parent. Sure, some parents are dumber, and some don’t care about their kids. But many, if not a majority, do care. But the teachers don’t listen to the parents, and then treat them like dumb shits, because they, the teachers are the professionals, with college degrees to prove it. Some even have summer school doctorates (EdD, like Jill Biden).
Not just reading and writing but speaking.
My brother had rhotacism (inability to pronounce 'w') when he was young. Spend 4-5 years in speach therapy.
Flash to adulthood and I'm visiting.
His son, Sean (ot quite two), toddles into the room and mumbles a bunch of little kid babble.
Paul puts on a fake pout and Elmer Fudd's back to him in a funny voice.
After Sean toddles off I look at my brother and calmly ask "Paul, how long were you in remedial speach?"
His face turned white. From the next day forward, baby talk was disallowed in his home.
Sean as a grown man still has an audible trace of rhotacism.
mikee said...
"I scoff at the "whole word" BS that is often used as an attempt to teach reading as if we used cuneiform for our written language."
Scoff all you want, kid's proclivities range.
My grandmother taught me to read before I went to school and once I knew the sounds I learned words by their whole shapes and still read that way.
Blogger typingtalker said...
"I'm sure that repeating a grade helps some students but certainly not all students."
Agreed. It helps those who are lagging behind, it isn't useful to those who aren't.
Typingtopic@2:12
You have a long list of excuses...not reasons.
Child’s socio-economic background>>>has nothing to do with ability to learn to read
Physical abnormalities>>>OK this is a reason, If it has to do with vision, or hearing
Mental and psychological imbalance>>>sure, mental issues are a factor, but they can read
Interest of the child.>>> Teachers primary job is to create interest.
Familiarity with symbols>>No Idea what this means. Dislixia? Covered in 2
Teacher’ ability to help children to learn>>>That's even dumber than not reading by 3rd grade
Parents with histories of reading difficulties.>>>> Parents that model reading are important but not a reason
Diagnosed with a specific language impairment or a hearing impairment,>>>covered in 2
Gained less knowledge or skills related to literacy during preschool years>>>the failure of Head Start proves this wrong
Limited experience with books>>>The kid has had 3 years of experience. Thats the purpose of school
Speech and hearing problems>>>again 2
Poor phonemic awareness.>>> Since schools abandoned phonix that would be a reason to make it law
Limited English language skills ??? dont know what to do with this
Limited access to books>>>>WHAT????Schools are choke full of books
School’s ability to meet each student’s reading challenges>>>AGAIN that what schools are supposed to do.
What is that? two or three actual barriers? That is a small number, easily addressed.
Quaestor said...
"Every written language known contains phonetic elements..."
Cuneiform 'ox' was initially a literal picture of an ox head. It later went through a number of changes and among other things has become our letter 'A'. This shows the development of several cuneiform letters from the initial pictographs. Hieroglyphics developed off Cuneiform. Chinese ideograms had the same track from pictures to abstract.
I'd hazard none of those languages started out phonetically but that phonetic elements were introduced after the writing was adopted.
Point me to corrective papers if I'm wrong, please.
As for whole word reading, you don't start out having people memorize how "antidisestablishmentarianism" looks like, you start at the bottom with letters and build to words. Importantly, you don't sound out in your head while reading. For instance, I know what 'mem' looks and sounds like but I don't sound it when I read 'memorize', I have the shape of 'memorize' memorized and simply move past.
Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were two of the best prose stylists of the 19th century, or any century, and they were both largely self-taught, facing great obstacles to their education. Where there is desire it can be done.
The ONLY people on the face of the earth that believe (or pretend to believe) that "whole word" reading instruction works are the faculty of schools of Education, the very dumbest students from those schools, and seemingly close to 100% of the administrators in the public schools.
Linguists, Cognitive Psychologists, and Neuroscientists all know that ALL the real research shows that to learn to read, kids HAVE to master the sound-representational system of the language ("phonics") or they will never be able to read fluently.* We actually know quite a lot about how people read and learn to read (Highly recommend Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain).
But Ed Schools and school administrators keep pushing a method of teaching reading that never had any real scientific support (the garbage studies that supposedly justify the method were done in the 60s and 70s by social science types rather than real scientists--or even by real English teachers).
Every Linguist I know has a story about trying to explain to some "whole word" person why the method CAN'T work and walking away from the conversation stunned by the rock-solid refusal even to LISTEN. It is like a religious conviction, to the point where a lot of teachers will refuse to believe their own experiences even when the obvious is slapping them in the face. I would love to know the explanation for this dogmatic insistence on repeating methods that have universally failed.
(A Cognitive Psychologist I am friends with said "Admitting phonics works would mean admitting that conservatives were right about even one thing, and we can't have that." But that's too cynical even for me. Everyone who teaches must see that "whole word" fails spectacularly wherever it is tried. And "phonics" couldn't always have been a "conservative" thing because it was how EVERYBODY learned to read, which is why it wasn't even called "phonics" until the '70s. I wonder if there is a Pritzker family equivalent: some creepy evil weirdos behind the scenes paying to spread ideas that are obviously wrong and harmful, but which get defended first by powerful people on the take and then reflexively by their dim-witted flying monkeys).
*There is a TINY subset of people with one or two very specific kinds of dyslexia that can't master phonetic encoding but can memorize the visual images of words.
My Mom taught me to read when I was 4 using a Phonics textbook from the late 1940's that she bought from a thrift store for a dime. I went to try and buy a copy for nostalgias sake a few years ago. They're selling for almost $50 a copy now as they've become very popular with the home schooling crowd. It's a good thing she taught me that way as the schools had switched to "sight reading" in the 1970's, and I grew up with classmatess who clearly never learned how to read and sound out words
WK said...
We made sure our kids could read before starting school. Caused its own set of problems with boredom. We used to get calls from our son’s first grade teacher that he was hiding books on his lap and reading for his own enjoyment instead of doing assigned work. He seemed to not be challenged by finding the missing letter in “m_p”. Next to a picture of a mop.
One of my childhood memories from the third grade was when my parents were called in to a parent/teacher conference- about me- and weren't told why ahead of time. I couldn't tell them why.
On that fateful day during the social studies lesson I was blissfully ignoring the teacher. If you recall those days (I'm 68) the texts were much larger then regular books. The teacher started walking towards me- and I didn't notice. Suddenly, she reached down and snatched away Podkayne of Mars by Robert Heinlein. And then just stared at the book and then stared at me. I felt I was in terrible trouble. How was the the school teaching reading? The inexecrable Dick and Jane books- whole language, not phonics. That night my parents went in not knowing what to expect, and first thing the counselor did who had been called in for this was hold up Podkayne of Mars and say I was caught reading it during a lesson in something else. And before my parents could say anything asked "Does he read books like this? A lot?" Well, yes I did. So the reason the meeting was called- in group reading where we all took turns, I never had any clue where we were as I drifted off. They thought I couldn't read, and were going to recommend I be put in special ed. That would not have gone over well with my mother. Administrators were much more sensible back then. For the rest of my 2 years in that district during reading classes I was sent to the library to read.
Joe Smith said...
'We made sure our kids could read before starting school.'
As a kid, we had library night. Every Tuesday for years. Different day, but up until my parents got divorced that was the standard in my family. My kids got bookstore visits on a regular basis- we generally had (and have) more interesting books then the local libraries. And if they OWN the book, and picked it out, they were far more likely to read it.
And what probably isn't accurate as to every written language, some contained phonetic elements. The alphabet, from reading, arose once in human history, and all phonetic alphabets developed and spread from there. Didn't happen in China or anywhere in Asia, nor in the Americas, nor Africa, nor even in Europe. Mideast. From a google search on first alphabet: The first alphabet created from Egyptian hieroglyphs in the Sinai area was picked up by Phoenician traders in the 11th century BC, who adopted it and altered it to suit their own needs, A society that depends on hieroglyphs will never develop widespread literacy. The Phoenicians with spreading early phonics are responsible for today's world.
Only about half the Chinese are literate in traditional Chinee. Doesn't that make you wonder how the entire nation has a higher IQ? It's because they only test those who are literate. Same with most of Asia. If you don't test those with lower IQs, you're going to get a higher average IQ.
Onigolicella writes, "Cuneiform 'ox' was initially a literal picture of an ox head..."
That may be true, but that may be difficult to prove. The problem is in the same document a given shape may serve two or more functions, i.e. as a symbolic representation of a concrete object, such as an ox, or a sound, such as alf in Canaanite. This isn't unusual. We do this in English all the time. The letter B is usually a consonant, as in boy. However, B can serve to indicate the second element of an ordered list, where B's significance isn't a sound, but its ordinal position in the alphabet. Cuneiform isn't picture writing, and it is likely it never was. While it is true that some instances of cuneiform do refer to something other than a spoken syllable, it's an open question as to how and when that came about. Is the symbol a picture or just a shorthand?
The assumption that cuneiform only referred pictographically to things and actions stymied archeology as a science for many decades. Cuneiform is primarily phonetic, and it can be used to record virtually any language, just like the alphabet can be used to write Finnish, Japanese, Gipuzkoan, or Italian. In the Bronze Age, Cuneiform recorded Indo-Euporean Hittite, Semitic Canaanite, and several Mesopotamian languages, including some language isolates. It endured until ink and papyrus replaced wet clay. By that time the much more compact alphabetic systems had started to replace syllabaries in the Eastern Mediterranean. (There are some languages that use dental clicks that are frustrating to linguists attempting transliterations into Latin-derived alphabets. Cuneiform probably wouldn't help that task either.)
The same is true of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Early Modern European scholars first began to discuss and form opinions about the hieroglyphs when mummies were imported into Italy in the 15th century for their supposed medicinal value. (Yeah, that's both true and crazy.) The inscriptions on mummy caskets and on the linen wrappings were quite befuddling. It seemed from the pictures the ancient people of the Nile wrote very little about anything but ducks. One would think the discovery of the Rosetta Stone centuries later with its mixture of Greek text and "picture writing" would have led immediately to a decipherment, but didn't. It took a brilliant Frenchman who took the trouble to learn an obscure language spoken by an obscure and secretive people to make the Rosetta Stone useful.
(to be continued later)
On dyslexia- Mentioned several times. I have read numerous things by proponents of phonics that a diagnosis of dyslexia occurs only in people who were taught look-say, whole language, or some other nonsense way instead of phonics. This isn't well studied, likely because it would trash all modern forms of reading education taught in teaching colleges. It's something that can't be studied, so it isn't. Heinlein was one of those that said that- and he said that according to older educators he knew, some from the one schoolroom days for all grades, that a student who couldn't learn reading by phonics couldn't learn much of anything else either.
When I instruct Scouts in the Citizenship in the Nation Merit Badge I'll have them read aloud the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Just doing that one simple thing tells me whether they learned phonics or didn't. Those that learned reading by phonics can read them without difficulty.
(continued from 11:15 PM)
Jean-François Champollion was able to perform his philological miracle by approaching the Rosetta enigma phonetically. For more than two decades since its discovery by members of Napoleon's Egyptian expeditionary force, European scholars believed -- rightly -- that the Stone contained a text in three languages, one of them being Attic Greek, which most educated 19th-century Europeans could read. However, thanks to their picture-writing/rebus assumptions regarding hieroglyphics every prior decipherment effort yielded nonsense. As a result, many concluded the Rosetta Stone was a red herring and moved on to less frustrating questions.
Champollion took a different tack. He surmised that an important language like Egyptian could not have simply vanished without a trace. Just like Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, something of pharaonic Egyptian must have survived into the Modern Era. He gambled that the surviving descendant was Coptic, the native speech of Muslim Egypt's downtrodden Christian minority.
Though Coptic speakers were thin on the ground and wary of strangers with questions, their written language had a long preserved history extending to the early Christian centuries. Since it was rendered with the Greek script, Champollion could deduce the approximate pronunciations, and with parallel texts, mostly the Gospels, and the aid of some friendly Copts, he learned to read and speak a language he firmly believed to be similar if not identical to the language carved on the ancient walls of Thebes and Memphis. With Coptic under his command, Champollion returned to the Rosetta inscriptions.
He noticed that the hieroglyphic text contained several short strings of characters enclosed by a drawing of a knotted cord. Since the enclosing line resembled a musket cartridge in cross-section, Champollion named that feature a cartouche, the French word for that form of munitions. He also noticed that some cartouches were approximately in the same relative position in the hieroglyphic text as certain personal names in the Greek portion of the inscriptions, particularly Πτολεμαῖος,
Ptolemaîos, the royal name of the fifteen Macedonian pharaohs of Egypt.
Making the bold assumption that the symbols within that cartouche were phonetically equivalent to Ptolemaîos, he plugged his hypothetical phonic values into the corresponding positions within other cartouches. Suddenly, Champollion was confronted with other familiar names -- Alexander, Berenike, Cleopatra! However, those were all foreign names. What about native Egyptian words? Champollion began making phonetic substations outside the cartouches. Immediately he could read recognizable versions of common Coptic verbs and nouns. The entire foundation of Egyptology was destroyed and reborn in that instant. Feathers weren't feathers. Lotus flowers weren't lotus flowers. Vultures weren't vultures. Lions weren't lions. All those "pictures" were consonants, vowels, or complete syllables.
(to be continued)
"Isn't it obvious that a strict retention rule lights a fire under everyone to strive very hard to save children from getting held back?"
The last thing public teachers unions want is a fire lit under their members.
Kids are sponges. They want to learn. When they see mom and dad reading they want to learn what the marks on the page mean too.
What Mississippi has done is hold their students to standard. That is very important inteaching kids anything. "This is what we expect from you. We'll help you, but you're going to have to do the work to get there." And if you can engage the kid they will usually rise to meet that standard.
Nothing is easy.
My daughter (now 38) grew up in a small city in Louisiana. At her middle school, they instituted a policy that no one could go on to High School until they passed some minimum standard.
Sounded good. But my daughter reported that the result was a population of bitter and not very bright 15 and 16 year old's who, in her words, "ruled the school".
Nothing is easy. My daughter, now 38, grew up in a small city in Louisiana. Her middle school began a policy that no one could pass on to High School until they met certain learning standards.
Sounds good.
She reported there was a problem however. The middle school soon had a population of bitter and not very bright 15 and 16 year old's who, in her words, 'ruled the school'.
Nothin is easy.
Nothing is easy. My daughter, now 38, grew up in a small city in Louisiana. Her middle school began a policy that no one could pass on to High School until they met certain learning standards.
Sounds good.
She reported there was a problem however. The middle school soon had a population of bitter and not very bright 15 and 16 year old's who, in her words, 'ruled the school'.
Nothin is easy.
Quaestor, your discussion of the Rosetta Stone is fascinating! Looking forward to the next installment.
Late night mistakes- it was Jerry Pournelle, not Heinlein, who wrote about phonics. And his wife developed a program for teaching people to read- using phonics.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/OldReading.html
That crossed my mind during one of my middle of the night wakefulness sessions.
I'm certain Heinlein agreed with his thoughts.
Late night mistakes- it was Jerry Pournelle, not Heinlein, who wrote about phonics. And his wife developed a program for teaching people to read- using phonics.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/OldReading.html
That crossed my mind during one of my middle of the night wakefulness sessions.
I'm certain Heinlein agreed with his thoughts.
Gospace said: "This isn't well studied, likely because it would trash all modern forms of reading education taught in teaching colleges. It's something that can't be studied, so it isn't."
The problem is not that dyslexia and learning reading isn't well studied. It's EXTREMELY well studied. The problem is that people in the Ed Schools--particularly the lower-tier Ed School which produce the vast majority of the teachers--dogmatically refuse to even engage with the vast amount of solid scientific research on reading and dyslexia. The people I know who work in this field often start out really excited about how their research can have practical applications. A couple even enthusiastically translated their conclusions into really concrete teaching suggestions (down to the level of which fonts might be better), and found themselves not just ignored, but aggressively rejected. People in the Ed Schools hate home-schoolers with a fiery passion, and phonetics-based approaches are associated with home schoolers, so it must be the case that phonetics is evil.
I sat in one conference session in which all three presenters studiously avoided using the WORD "phonics" even though everything they were saying was about the connection between reading and phonetic encoding.
I highly recommend Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain for anyone interested in the topic and particular for parents or relatives of people with dyslexia. Also recommend Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid (she's just not quite as good at writing for a non-scientist audience as Dehaene is). Wolf runs a great research program on dyslexia. She fairly recently moved from Boston to UCLA, and her Center is in the Ed School, so MAYBE there is some hope.
She reported there was a problem however. The middle school soon had a population of bitter and not very bright 15 and 16 year old's who, in her words, 'ruled the school'.
Those kids need to be sent to an alternate middle school created just for them.
Regarding whole word learning (and I’m far from an expert, so anyone can correct me), someone noticed that self-taught readers learned this way, and they also turned out to be the best students.
Since all students are assumed to have the same potential (it’s astounding how common this assumption is in the education establishment), it was assumed that this must be the best way to learn to read.
Denying reality seldom leads to good results.
(continued from 2:36 AM)
I'm going to wrap this up with a brief discussion of a unique writing system that may have developed in isolation from the various lingua franca of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.
When Sir Arthur Evans began his excavation of the palace of Knossos, in addition to broken painted and plastered walls, he discovered numerous examples of hardened clay tablets incised with strange symbols closely resembling the markings on the "cylinder seals" that first attracted his mind to Crete. Evans saw nothing on those tablets that suggested they were related to the writings of the Near East. Consequently, he concluded he held in his hands examples of the first writing system in Europe. He didn't know what language or languages they represented -- only a few examples were intact, the rest were fragments. Yet Evans convinced himself of two certainties:
(1) There were in fact two distinct systems, a sacred script reserved for liturical purposes which he christened Linear A. And a mundane script used by Cretan bureaucrats he labeled Linear B.
(2) Whatever language the scripts recorded, it was certainly not Greek.
How Sir Arthur arrived at that second certainty is immaterial to my purpose here. Suffice it to say that his conceit utterly emasculated any hope Evans had of getting to the truth of Knossos. In spite of his academic brilliance, Arthur Evans torpedoed his most significant discovery by failing to exclude his biases.
In 1939, almost 40 years after Evans began to dig at Knossos, Carl Blegen began his work across the wine-dark sea on the southern tip of the Peloponnese at Pylos, according to Homer wise King Nestor's capital. On the very first day, hundreds of intact Linear B tablets appeared in the sandy soil.
Hmmmm... a script that cannot be Greek turns up in quantity in Greece? One would think Sir Arthur would be intrigued. And one would be wrong. According to his concept of European prehistory, the Cretans (Evans called them Minoans) conquered the mainland and civilized the barbaric Achaeans. Naturally, they brought their language with them, just as the British brought English to India. Consequently, Evans missed his last chance to reveal a hidden truth, and a gifted amateur philologist called Michael Ventris stepped in and deciphered Linear B by applying two blindingly obvious observations: With far more Linear B examples in Greece than in Crete, isn't it logical to assume the origins were in Greece and not elsewhere? Secondly, the known examples of unique symbols are too few for them to be logograms, and more numerous than is consistent with alphabetical scripts, therefore Linear B is a syllabary, i.e. a phonetic system. By a trial-and-error process of substituting common Arachic Greek syllables with Linear B symbols, Ventris solved Evan's intractable puzzle in a matter of months.
Quaestor:
If you focus on the resultant cuneiform, indeed it's barely pictorial. The first instances found were inventory lists so I'd place money on ox meaning ox, wheat meaning wheat, etc. Then it came to mean the sound. We're coming at it from different points in time and perhaps even different meanings for 'writing'.
Quaestor said...
Oligonicella writes, "Cuneiform 'ox' was initially a literal picture of an ox head..."
That may be true, but that may be difficult to prove.
"Beginning in the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, clay tokens are widely attested as a system of counting and identifying specific amounts of specified livestock or commodities. The tokens, enclosed in clay envelopes after being impressed on their rounded surface, were gradually replaced by impressions on flat or plano-convex tablets, and these in turn by more or less conventionalized pictures of the tokens incised on the clay with a reed stylus. The transition to writing was complete W. Hallo; W. Simpson (1971).
Ten oxen, ten tokens.
The problem is in the same document a given shape may serve two or more functions, i.e. as a symbolic representation of a concrete object, such as an ox, or a sound, such as alf in Canaanite.
The first instances were inventory lists, not communique of thought or story. I don't think ten tokens meant 'aaaaaaaaaalf'.
"Then it came to mean the sound. We're coming at it from different points in time and perhaps even different meanings for 'writing'."
I consider writing to be a means of conveying speech without actually hearing it spoken. What's your definition?
In today's news, I saw the Oregon governor signed a bill eliminating performance requirements for the thee R's, Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic, because standards are unfair to minorities. Mississippi's simple plan of ensuring every child can read is showing benefits, especially in the minority communities. In a decade, Mississippi will be one of the most literate states and Oregon be at the bottom. Now if Mississippi will also ditch New Math and go back to old fashioned rote arithmetic that drilled in the basics, they'll trounce the whole country.
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