To Withhold Reading Ability Is Downright EVIL

Here is an analysis by Deborah Andrews about Ferguson.  The facts stand out.  “Blacks locked out of reading” http://www.examiner.com/article/ferguson-facts-all-ignore-blacks-locked-out-of-reading

Only 15% of Black Missouri fourth graders score proficient or above in reading compared to 50% Whites.

Andrews deals with some of the psychological damages this does: “If you have not been taught how to read, you are finished before you start.”

Why is this willful, criminal withholding of teaching reading allowed? 

Again, if appears there may still be this overpowering educator bias against using phonics as a method.

No-one, in my searches, can really say why this bias is so ingrained and why it happened.

Nonetheless, we can’t wait for some profound cultural change to happen in the education industry.  This phonics method needs to be brought in to struggling communities.  Australia’s recent Review of the Curriculum brought forth these headlines:

“Australia to require the phonics method.”

“Education minister orders universities to teach phonics or face losing accreditation.” (Aug 10, 2014)

There are three ‘problems’ with phonics that might explain the confusion.

1) Competent readers don’t USE phonics.  It is a tool for learning to read, but not for actual reading.  Phonics practice helps us learn blending and segmenting, and plausible spelling patterns.

2) English is not phonetically regular.  Phonics does not provide guidance on how to pronounce many words.  We need to teach morphology too.

3) Many of us grew up with ‘rule-based phonics’ - with rules like ‘i before e except after c’.  These rule are mostly wrong, and this kind of phonics is mostly worthless.  Ad-hoc phonics lessons also don’t work, it needs to be taught systematically.

The research is crystal clear:  Phonics works, and systematic synthetic phonics instruction works best.  Against that, there isn’t a single study that demonstrates effectiveness of whole-language instruction.

Every child can become a strong reader.  Our public educators stick to methods that leave 30% with reading disabilities and illiteracy.

When is someone going to launch a class action suit that quantifies the monetary damages in a way that makes it clear that society is and has built up a debt which has to be paid as a result of negligence and incompetence within the public education system. 

The unwillingness and refusal to use the most effective methods represents systemic abuse no less than that applied to native Canadians in the residential school system, just subtler.

NO, Tom, There Is More To The Phonics Resistance !

Granted the problems you mention are there — they are practical problems.  There are probably 100s of practical problems with phonics that people bring forth. 

BUT, add them all up, there is still something MORE POLITICAL & IDEOLOGICAL about this.  The answer will be revealed yet, but so far, there is just speculation why certain subsets of people won’t let it in the door.  Not even as part of a smorgasbord of approaches to be used if needed.

Meanwhile, the show must go on.  Parents should be able to sue against this denial of service if their child can be seen as a likely candidate for phonics and it’s withheld. Our 30% reading disability and illiteracy rate is shameful and unacceptable.  Parents should be able to enforce phonics where indicated.  How?

This is what I just wrote to the Missouri paper that published this story I mentioned by Deb Andrews:

Is Failure To Teach Reading A Criminal Offence?  Why Not?

Why should whole populations be consigned to miserable lives just because their teachers refuse to use standard procedures that work?  If phonics approach works why is there still this educator resistance to embrace it?  It goes beyond snobbery.  There is something politically charged here but it will take a cultural change to find the cause of this acquired bias and correct it. 

But students cannot be allowed to be the fallout before this ideological battle is settled.

These are damning figures that Deborah Andrews has revealed.  Only 15% of fourth grade Blacks in Missouri read at the proficient or above level, while 50% of their White cohorts are at that level.

Andrews points out the psychological damage:  “If you have not been taught how to read, you are finished before you start.”  Isn’t the evidence clear enough yet about the school to prison pipeline?

Australia just finished a 6 month Review of Curriculum.  About reading, these are the headlines:  “Australia to require the phonics method.” & “Education minister orders universities to teach phonics or face losing accreditation.” (Aug 10, 2014)

Hopefully this glaring disparity in Missouri as revealed by this article will spur a turning point for solutions now.  No further studies or excuses — just bring in the phonics teams to start some of the work ahead.

This psychologist summarizes the two different types of reading problems he finds during educational testing.

Each type needs a different solution. But it still is the same approach that students must be taught directly using systematically approaches.
http://www.drselz.com/blog/2014/11/reading-problems-a-brief-primer-in-two-acts

For a more balanced view

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-child-literacy

1) Competent readers don’t USE phonics. 

>> Well, I think they do, except the process automatic, unconscious and done at a very high speed.
In any skill are somebody who is competent looks effortless and very different from somebody starting to acquire the skill. It’s just that the skill is automated, done at high speed, and flexible. Somebody who skates well no longer needs to consciously think to push, to shift the weight, to look forward.

2) English is not phonetically regular.  Phonics does not provide guidance on how to pronounce many words.  We need to teach morphology too.

>>Yes, technically you are correct.
However for practical purposes English is regular enough.
Probably 80% or more is covered by phonics and patterns where one sound can be written in 2, 3, 4 different ways.

3) Many of us grew up with ‘rule-based phonics’ - with rules like ‘i before e except after c’.  These rule are mostly wrong, and this kind of phonics is mostly worthless.  Ad-hoc phonics lessons also don’t work, it needs to be taught systematically.

>>Totally agree with you here.
The rules phonics is mostly worthless.

This type of phonics is the type of phonics found in the majority of phonics materials available. I know because I searched a long time until I found something that was logical enough for me.

If any phonics at all is taught in school, this rule phonics is what gets taught; because it’s widely available and because teachers are likely to have been exposed to it and they cannot tell the difference.
This rule phonics is almost as big a nigthmare as no phonics.

Add to it the propensity of teachers to be “creative” and to pick and choose from materials and methods and what you end up with when somebody says: “But I do teach phonics”  is likely a bit of rule-based phonics sprinkled around that no adult can make head and tail of let alone a 7 year old kid!
Again, I speak from experience.

There is one very good point in the article that Doug posted: change is hard, and top-down imposed, very regimented can easily backfire.

Think about how trains in Britain were brought to a stop simply by the workers following the letter of the railway regulations!

A change in the teaching mindset and competence in the syntetic phonics method are needed and these are not easy changes.

It is hard to change a whole system.  Those of us who have responsibility for children should realize that we do not have to wait for the whole system to change before we take action to change what is happening to our individual children.  If each of us takes action of some sort independent of what the system does, the system will change itself.

Frank Xavier: there have been individual lawsuits of this nature that have failed (Peter Doe v. San Francisco, 1974 or so).  The reason there has been no successful suit is that the legal framework of the relationships around the education system are not clear.  Only the labour laws regarding schools have been well fleshed out, that process accomplished because it benefitted unions to do so.  The legal relationships between parents and schools remains unclear, unexamined.  It is to this task that initial cases must apply themselves, not to the teaching per se.

In my view (a layperson’s view, based on my analysis so far, and untested in court), parents and schools have, in fact, no legal relationship with each other, nor, for that matter, do students and schools.  The legal relationships of parents, students, and schools are in each case with the state directly, and the question of how a child is taught in a public school is not a matter of that child’s rights or the school’s obligation to that child( or their parent), because neither of those actually exists in law.  That’s been borne out in case law. 

The parent and the state have a legal relationship from the time a child is born until the child reaches the age of majority, and the state requires that during a portion of that time, a child attend school or be otherwise educated, according to a democratically-determined definition at any given time of what constitutes an education.  Legally I believe there is a weakness there, where the definition of an education is disproportionately determined from within the teacher ranks, rather than by the public at large.  That is examined through the lens of the legal relationship that citizens have with their governments.

There are in fact hundreds of legal weaknesses in the whole structure and power of schooling, and it will likely take hundreds of lawsuits, class action and otherwise, to get the level of clarity that is required to overcome the current power of the bureaucracy (in academe, in government, in the support industries) and labour over how children are raised.  Hundreds of lawsuits is how labour got into the position of power that it has, and contributes to how academe remains untouchable. 

It will not do anything to wonder when the *ONE* key legal case that will solve everything will magically occur.  The genius who can identify what the ONE key issue is does not actually exist, partly because there is not one key issue.  The system keeps us at bay through a thousand tiny regulatory details, each of which (or at least a critical mass) must be broken through a lawsuit.  The task of fixing the legal mess that keeps this toxic system so unresponsive to the public will be a joint effort to which many, many individuals will need to contribute. 

We are not organized, and while that is a problem, it is more of a problem that it profits no one to organize us.  Thus, each of us can only take action in our own place.  If, in the next 2 years, the courts were to be inundated by lawsuits - tens of thousands of them - even if they don’t succeed, the political polarization that currently holds so many of us paralyzed would be shattered enough that ... the system would change itself. 

I referred in my first paragraph to taking action.  Many parents can take some sort of action with respect to their own children, and acting to protect the child has value.  But there is always a legal principle behind what happens to a child, and until those legal principles are established/challenged in court, the next child will experience exactly the same thing; no sustainable benefit is achieved by improving the lot of one child. 

My basic premise at this point is that court action is the only viable means of achieving systemic educational change of any kind.  And no one’s going to do it for us.  While we’re nattering on the internet (and previously, while we were baking cookies), they are in court doing it for themselves.