I am appreciative of your thoughts and think my foray into the question is limited to the question of where visual neurodiversity fits in. Whatever "decoding" is called, it works best for those of us with aphantasia. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/decoding-without-pictures
"In education, few things are more alluring than the claim that “phonics” (which is not actually a unified thing at all) is the magic key to fixing reading."
I thought that it was already abundantly obvious that there is no magic key, other than maybe parents that ride their offspring's little asses like Momsie was trying to impersonate Willie Shoemaker on an OCD meth bender or something.
It will seem apparent shortly that I have not read all the way through on your post. However, for my sister and me, who had a mother and grandmother start READING to us before we could put whole words into sentences and taking us to the public library for books well before kindergarten and reading them to us and having us read them back to them probably was their form of phonics! BUT it taught us the love of reading well before first grade. Can parents still do this with the help of others? Note these were real books, not screens either. In my 70's I still prefer real books not the electronic ones. THANKS for your post!
I'm with you. I'm in my 60s and have kids in high school (!). We read to them, dragged them through libraries, and they can read just fine. In elementary school, there was a program (Book-It) where if they documented so many hours of reading each summer, they won a t-shirt or a pizza or whatever. It was awesome. In any case, I must conclude that the problem lies with the parents who cannot or will not do their part in teaching their children to read. I have no solutions, just a comment on your comment :-)
> it taught us the love of reading well before first grade
The sharpest lesson about this idea was an offhand remark by Megan McArdle, "those of us who like reading enough to do it on the weekend". My suspicion is that people don't "learn" to love reading, they have the sort of personality that likes reading (once they learn how to). In your case, you are descendant from two generations of people who like to read, and the apple tends to fall near the tree.
What this means for the bigger picture is that the challenge is how to teach children *who do not like to read* how to read reasonably well. And that you can't do it by "teaching them to love reading" first and then the children will become better readers by self-motivated exercising of the skill. Sort of the reverse of the joke that the difficult task was not teaching Michelangelo how to be an artist but would be in *preventing* him from becoming an artist.
"What this means for the bigger picture is that the challenge is how to teach children *who do not like to read* how to read reasonably well." -- Yes! Not every person is going to love reading. Ideally, parents expose their children to reading and encourage them at it, but that is no guarantee they will love it. Learning to read is like learning to swim (in my area with abundant bodies of water) -- you don't have to love it, but you do need to learn to do it adequately well to flourish in life.
I find that entire debate about whole language vs phonics fascinating because it's simply not a thing where I live. The consensus here is that what you call the whole language learning model is a weird esoteric approach that doesn't actually teach reading but produces children that mostly appear like legasthenics.
Talented students will be talented whether they learn with either. Students who struggle will struggle regardless. The ladder will indeed probably see some modest advantages to learning with phonics when it comes to word level decoding, but as I say here they're simply is no evidentiary basis for claiming that learning phonics has Superior outcomes for actual reading comprehension. People have developed this whole bizarre mythology about phonics as this incredible salve, but it just doesn't show up in the research record. Everybody is always looking for a magic bullet. Anyways, the particulars really matter here and I've laid them out in this post.
Of course, a certain amount of intrinsic motivation and curiosity is always the key. There's just no substitution for that. I also think that a lot of the incentives to read and be curious and generally *interested* in things has to come from home, rather than school. But that's an entirely different discussion.
There's considerable evidence (as Freddie says) that a large chunk of kids will learn to read regardless of method--and (also as Freddie says) most schools teach kids to sound out words.
Might be, I don't know about any specifics because as I said it's not even a discussion here. Nobody has to do a survey or provide any numbers. But saying that kids are learning something "regardless", is not actually high praise for any teaching method.
Your inference skills need upgrading, although your statement is correct. The point of saying a large chunk of kids will learn regardless of method is to make it clear that obsessing about the method is largely a waste of time.
I think you might have misunderstood my original comment. This debate is fascinating to me because I didn't even know until very recently that it existed in the first place. I have no idea how well or badly whole language learning would work in the current situation because in my capacities of teacher, tutor and parent I have never come across someone who was using it or who even had experienced it being used.
No,I understood it. But you appeared to be interpreting my statement that "most students will learn reading regardless" as "high praise for any teaching method."
And yes, all the phonics fanatics tend to ignore the fact that most schools use phonics so it's unlikely you ever met anyone who only used whole language.
1. Mississippi has rocketed up in the NAEP reading rankings because they are using approaches that other states are not using. Something can have a small impact and still be enough to change the ranking, a point you yourself make when pointing out that "A kid who goes from being a 20th percentile reader to a 25th percentile reader thanks to the advantage of phonics instruction over other methods is going to receive real but very modest practical benefits from doing so." MS is doing much more than just phonics, so the the large jump in the rankings is not surprising.
2. I don't think anyone in education is arguing that "nth percentile readers" is a useful concept. Obviously the value in being a better reader is the intrinsic utility of being able to read better, not relative improvement in one's position compared to other readers. Reading proficiently is a skill that nearly all students can develop, and there's no reason to worry about academic ability imposing any kind of cap on how much schools can improve in reading instruction.
As you are aware, I don't think the improvement is real at all. It looks exactly like previous state level frauds that are eventually revealed - and as was true early on in those cases, people are preventing healthy skepticism by insisting that skeptics hate children.
OK, but to be fair, those were not really state-level frauds. They were local frauds, and you haven’t provided any mechanism by which the entire state of Mississippi could possibly be cheating at NAEP over a 12 year period.
For example, Piper provided data on how many students take the test and how many students are exempted. I don’t see any wiggle room for students to be disappeared from the data set in order to juke the results.
Mississippi rocketed up the rankings in 4th grade only. And in 4th grade, they rocketed up not because of huge improvements but because they didn't lose any of their gains. Black 4th grade scores in the bottom percentile have cratered since 2019.
So any real gains showed in 2019 and haven't shown since th3en.
By 8th grade, MS doesn't look that impressive particularly when considering that MS has no ELLS tested. Compare by race and income, and MS really only looks good in comparison to states whose population includes a lot of ELLS.
And by junior year, MS reading scores aren't terribly impressive.
What's the point of miraculous 4th grade scores if they don't turn out miraculous scores in high school?
I think the point is that different parts of the problem require different solutions. There is no single miracle solution K-12, but clearly Mississippi is doing some things right in the early grades that other states should imitate.
This is part of what has puzzled me about this given the Covid timeline and the much-publicized declines in richer coastal states.
How much actual improvement is there in Mississippi rocketing up in its relative position to other states during that time period? Does a modest increase just happen to look huge in context?
Which isn't to debunk it, there's always "a point" to improvement even where gains may be small, but is there actually a "miracle" here that needs explaining?
That is exactly what I said happened. They hit their high in 2019. Dropped during the pandemic and got back to 2019's scores. And when you tell Vaites and Piper that the program started in 2013 they protest and say no, it started in 2015.
Regardless, you don't see a spike in 8th grade when the 2019 kids get there, which is odd.
"If phonics were truly magic, you’d expect a huge jump in national/comparative reading comprehension scores wherever phonics gets mandated, durable gains that persist into higher grades without massive extra instruction, uniform benefits across students (rich and poor, strong and weak) in comprehension, and minimal need for other reading supports."
That's precisely what we see in the Mississippi Miracle story—a huge jump in comparistive reading scores on NAEP. Importantly, these gains were observed across all performance bands—top, middle, and bottom deciles, for example.
True, these gains don't persist very strongly into higher grades because, as you hinted at earlier, comprehension (which is based on background knowledge) starts to become more important by the 8th grade NAEP.
But if you're setting a bar here, I don't see how Mississippi isn't clearing it.
For the rest of the story, See Natalie Wexler's work on knowledge-building curriculum:
But knowledge building curriculum gives the kids knowledge, often orally.
It doesn't help with acquiring knowledge by reading.
The hope is that if you give kids enough knowledge they will then be able to acquire new knowledge on their own, but that's not proven and if it's not obvious, it's intensely dependent on cognitive ability. For that matter, knowledge building curriculum relies on the kids being smart enough to remember it. Natalie's book mentioned that the wonderful curriculum she wrote about wasn't raising test scores and she was surprised to see that the kids didn't really remember a lot of what they'd "learned". (something no teacher would find shocking.)
This is an extremely incorrect take on knowledge-building curriculum. Of course the goal of building knowledge is to help students better comprehend what they read (and thus learn from it).
I think phonics is a very useful tool, for what it is. My own anecdote is that my kids started with phonics on their path to learning to read. It’s basically step 1. Tough to read words if you have no tools for decoding and phonetically pronouncing them.
But FdB makes many crucial points. Being able to sound out words (just as I can sound out words in other languages which I don’t actually speak) is a necessary but insufficient step in comprehending what those words mean, or further downstream skills like composing and deciphering thoughts, concepts, and ideas using those words. And I’d be surprised if school systems didn’t already start with phonics in grade 1. If such school systems exist, they should definitely rectify that problem. This seems like the lowest hanging of fruit.
I do think this may be one area where FdB’s usual rebuttal about the overall usefulness of pedagogical tools in lifting all boats may not fully apply. If there are some students who are currently NOT receiving phonics training, that seems like a fixable problem to allow those cohorts to be brought up to age-appropriate speeds. But that still only gets them back to the starting block. It won’t change the fact that 50% of students will still score below the group median on ANY test of any skill. Some students by definition will still be left behind. But at least they might still have attained a higher absolute level of ability (even if remaining dismal relative to their peers) that allows them to better function later as adults.
I agree. Like I said, phonics is necessary but insufficient for literacy and proficiency. If it’s not currently being universally taught, it should be. But my kids are well past school age so I have no idea what schools do now, least of all in Mississippi.
I learned to read via phonics in public school back in the 1960s. I recall a worksheet I had to complete for homework in 4th grade. One of the words was "bee-tle," Beetle! I exclaimed. That's a bug. "Correct" my mom said. But note that I was raised by married parents in a middle class home. My parents talked to me and read to me and had a college level vocabulary. So I knew what a beetle was before I ever saw the word in print.
In contrast if I had been born poor it's quite likely my parent(s) would merely have used the word "bug" for roaches, beetles, centipedes, etc. So if you don't know what a beetle is, the ability to sound it out is useless.
This ties in with Freddie's larger theme that IQ matters far more than any educational method in how well children learn. So we will continue to spend billions of dollars on various pedological schemes, hoping to change this inconvenient truth. The money is not really wasted though. Even if ineffective, spending vast sums on public education lets the lower classes know that at least government is trying. And this in itself helps lessen social discord.
If you had a low IQ it wouldn't matter how much your parents talked to you and read to you with their college level vocabulary. My parents had IQs just above and just below 100. I was reading at college level at 3rd grade.
There are other ways we could spend the money. Believe me when I say that low income schools do not see the money being spent in any way that matters to them, if they see it at all.
Well, I'd be interested to know where you think all the money poured into public education is going? Note that North Dakota tends to have high test scores despite relatively low per capita spending on education. Washington DC is just the opposite. This implies culture, rather than money is the biggest factor.
Just musing here from a theoretical phonologist, but I wonder whether there's a stronger connection between 'phonics' and the ability to spell correctly. I have anecdotal evidence that this is true, and, if so, wouldn't be THAT big a deal, but might be interesting.
Overall, I think the Mississippi Miracle is less about phonics and more about muscular state action (centered on phonics).
The big comparison here is between states that are acting as a single administrative unit, as Mississippi is, and those that let everyone do their own thing.
Apart from the specific changes, just getting everyone following one particular plan is likely to yield results, and that’s what we’re seeing here.
So yes, teachers everywhere use phonics; very few K-1 classrooms are completely phonics-free. But few states are coordinating their approach as tightly as the Southern Surge states.
I had my disillusionment moment about educational miracles a while back. In a college psychology class, I used to show an educational video to accompany my lecture on the role of expectations in academic performance. Note that I am a social psychologist, not an expert in education, but even then engagement was important, and it was a pretty interesting video, narrated by Andre Braugher (of Brooklyn 99).
The video itself focused on interventions to raise low expectations in teachers and students, and one of the segments touted dramatic improvement in a low performing school through teacher retraining and environmental changes to classrooms. After a few years, I decided to find out how the school was faring: well, turns out it was involved in a standardized testing scandal, maybe even had to close. Lesson learned.
This may seem tangential, but I think the “word callers” criticism can become more apparent if you observe trends in classically-trained musicians failing to improvise comfortably without skill development in that facility of communication. Many classical musicians are adept readers of sheet music who are capable of “decoding” what’s on their page to sound, but may fail to know what to do when asked to improvise a melodic phrase without knowing how to create such meaning using pitches themselves.
Phonics decoding is a component of language reading, learning and application, not a catch-all solution framework for how to do all of that.
The thing that impressed me the most in the recent pro-Mississippi Miracle piece, was not the discussion of phonics but MS's practice of holding students back a year at third grade if they had not demonstrated minimum competency. The article said that this had the effect of focusing the everyone - students, teachers and parents - on the problem and forcing them to address it on an individual basis. This seems sensible and logical and would seem to be a practice that should be considered elsewhere.
I am appreciative of your thoughts and think my foray into the question is limited to the question of where visual neurodiversity fits in. Whatever "decoding" is called, it works best for those of us with aphantasia. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/decoding-without-pictures
"In education, few things are more alluring than the claim that “phonics” (which is not actually a unified thing at all) is the magic key to fixing reading."
I thought that it was already abundantly obvious that there is no magic key, other than maybe parents that ride their offspring's little asses like Momsie was trying to impersonate Willie Shoemaker on an OCD meth bender or something.
So you would think
It will seem apparent shortly that I have not read all the way through on your post. However, for my sister and me, who had a mother and grandmother start READING to us before we could put whole words into sentences and taking us to the public library for books well before kindergarten and reading them to us and having us read them back to them probably was their form of phonics! BUT it taught us the love of reading well before first grade. Can parents still do this with the help of others? Note these were real books, not screens either. In my 70's I still prefer real books not the electronic ones. THANKS for your post!
I'm with you. I'm in my 60s and have kids in high school (!). We read to them, dragged them through libraries, and they can read just fine. In elementary school, there was a program (Book-It) where if they documented so many hours of reading each summer, they won a t-shirt or a pizza or whatever. It was awesome. In any case, I must conclude that the problem lies with the parents who cannot or will not do their part in teaching their children to read. I have no solutions, just a comment on your comment :-)
Say what you want about the woman, but the Dolly Parton Imagination Library has brought a lot of books to a lot of human kittens.
Cargo cult thinking. You build the airports, planes will appear!
> it taught us the love of reading well before first grade
The sharpest lesson about this idea was an offhand remark by Megan McArdle, "those of us who like reading enough to do it on the weekend". My suspicion is that people don't "learn" to love reading, they have the sort of personality that likes reading (once they learn how to). In your case, you are descendant from two generations of people who like to read, and the apple tends to fall near the tree.
What this means for the bigger picture is that the challenge is how to teach children *who do not like to read* how to read reasonably well. And that you can't do it by "teaching them to love reading" first and then the children will become better readers by self-motivated exercising of the skill. Sort of the reverse of the joke that the difficult task was not teaching Michelangelo how to be an artist but would be in *preventing* him from becoming an artist.
"What this means for the bigger picture is that the challenge is how to teach children *who do not like to read* how to read reasonably well." -- Yes! Not every person is going to love reading. Ideally, parents expose their children to reading and encourage them at it, but that is no guarantee they will love it. Learning to read is like learning to swim (in my area with abundant bodies of water) -- you don't have to love it, but you do need to learn to do it adequately well to flourish in life.
I find that entire debate about whole language vs phonics fascinating because it's simply not a thing where I live. The consensus here is that what you call the whole language learning model is a weird esoteric approach that doesn't actually teach reading but produces children that mostly appear like legasthenics.
Talented students will be talented whether they learn with either. Students who struggle will struggle regardless. The ladder will indeed probably see some modest advantages to learning with phonics when it comes to word level decoding, but as I say here they're simply is no evidentiary basis for claiming that learning phonics has Superior outcomes for actual reading comprehension. People have developed this whole bizarre mythology about phonics as this incredible salve, but it just doesn't show up in the research record. Everybody is always looking for a magic bullet. Anyways, the particulars really matter here and I've laid them out in this post.
My ladder saw no advantages, but then I remembered - it's not my real ladder, just my step-ladder.
Of course, a certain amount of intrinsic motivation and curiosity is always the key. There's just no substitution for that. I also think that a lot of the incentives to read and be curious and generally *interested* in things has to come from home, rather than school. But that's an entirely different discussion.
There's considerable evidence (as Freddie says) that a large chunk of kids will learn to read regardless of method--and (also as Freddie says) most schools teach kids to sound out words.
Might be, I don't know about any specifics because as I said it's not even a discussion here. Nobody has to do a survey or provide any numbers. But saying that kids are learning something "regardless", is not actually high praise for any teaching method.
Your inference skills need upgrading, although your statement is correct. The point of saying a large chunk of kids will learn regardless of method is to make it clear that obsessing about the method is largely a waste of time.
I think you might have misunderstood my original comment. This debate is fascinating to me because I didn't even know until very recently that it existed in the first place. I have no idea how well or badly whole language learning would work in the current situation because in my capacities of teacher, tutor and parent I have never come across someone who was using it or who even had experienced it being used.
No,I understood it. But you appeared to be interpreting my statement that "most students will learn reading regardless" as "high praise for any teaching method."
And yes, all the phonics fanatics tend to ignore the fact that most schools use phonics so it's unlikely you ever met anyone who only used whole language.
You actually think I said "high praise" in that context not sarcastically?
I need a cigarette after reading that.
Two quick points about relative improvement:
1. Mississippi has rocketed up in the NAEP reading rankings because they are using approaches that other states are not using. Something can have a small impact and still be enough to change the ranking, a point you yourself make when pointing out that "A kid who goes from being a 20th percentile reader to a 25th percentile reader thanks to the advantage of phonics instruction over other methods is going to receive real but very modest practical benefits from doing so." MS is doing much more than just phonics, so the the large jump in the rankings is not surprising.
2. I don't think anyone in education is arguing that "nth percentile readers" is a useful concept. Obviously the value in being a better reader is the intrinsic utility of being able to read better, not relative improvement in one's position compared to other readers. Reading proficiently is a skill that nearly all students can develop, and there's no reason to worry about academic ability imposing any kind of cap on how much schools can improve in reading instruction.
As you are aware, I don't think the improvement is real at all. It looks exactly like previous state level frauds that are eventually revealed - and as was true early on in those cases, people are preventing healthy skepticism by insisting that skeptics hate children.
OK, but to be fair, those were not really state-level frauds. They were local frauds, and you haven’t provided any mechanism by which the entire state of Mississippi could possibly be cheating at NAEP over a 12 year period.
For example, Piper provided data on how many students take the test and how many students are exempted. I don’t see any wiggle room for students to be disappeared from the data set in order to juke the results.
Mississippi rocketed up the rankings in 4th grade only. And in 4th grade, they rocketed up not because of huge improvements but because they didn't lose any of their gains. Black 4th grade scores in the bottom percentile have cratered since 2019.
So any real gains showed in 2019 and haven't shown since th3en.
By 8th grade, MS doesn't look that impressive particularly when considering that MS has no ELLS tested. Compare by race and income, and MS really only looks good in comparison to states whose population includes a lot of ELLS.
And by junior year, MS reading scores aren't terribly impressive.
What's the point of miraculous 4th grade scores if they don't turn out miraculous scores in high school?
I think the point is that different parts of the problem require different solutions. There is no single miracle solution K-12, but clearly Mississippi is doing some things right in the early grades that other states should imitate.
This is part of what has puzzled me about this given the Covid timeline and the much-publicized declines in richer coastal states.
How much actual improvement is there in Mississippi rocketing up in its relative position to other states during that time period? Does a modest increase just happen to look huge in context?
Which isn't to debunk it, there's always "a point" to improvement even where gains may be small, but is there actually a "miracle" here that needs explaining?
It’s a 12-year trend
But it's not. You can look up the data right here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE
There was a spike from 2017 to 2019. Nothing since.
Please see the graph here: https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-books?r=492j60&utm_medium=ios
That is exactly what I said happened. They hit their high in 2019. Dropped during the pandemic and got back to 2019's scores. And when you tell Vaites and Piper that the program started in 2013 they protest and say no, it started in 2015.
Regardless, you don't see a spike in 8th grade when the 2019 kids get there, which is odd.
The graph has raw scores on it too if you want to see the absolute change
"If phonics were truly magic, you’d expect a huge jump in national/comparative reading comprehension scores wherever phonics gets mandated, durable gains that persist into higher grades without massive extra instruction, uniform benefits across students (rich and poor, strong and weak) in comprehension, and minimal need for other reading supports."
That's precisely what we see in the Mississippi Miracle story—a huge jump in comparistive reading scores on NAEP. Importantly, these gains were observed across all performance bands—top, middle, and bottom deciles, for example.
True, these gains don't persist very strongly into higher grades because, as you hinted at earlier, comprehension (which is based on background knowledge) starts to become more important by the 8th grade NAEP.
But if you're setting a bar here, I don't see how Mississippi isn't clearing it.
For the rest of the story, See Natalie Wexler's work on knowledge-building curriculum:
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/whats-really-behind-the-southern
But knowledge building curriculum gives the kids knowledge, often orally.
It doesn't help with acquiring knowledge by reading.
The hope is that if you give kids enough knowledge they will then be able to acquire new knowledge on their own, but that's not proven and if it's not obvious, it's intensely dependent on cognitive ability. For that matter, knowledge building curriculum relies on the kids being smart enough to remember it. Natalie's book mentioned that the wonderful curriculum she wrote about wasn't raising test scores and she was surprised to see that the kids didn't really remember a lot of what they'd "learned". (something no teacher would find shocking.)
This is an extremely incorrect take on knowledge-building curriculum. Of course the goal of building knowledge is to help students better comprehend what they read (and thus learn from it).
"Of course the goal of building knowledge is to help students better comprehend what they read (and thus learn from it)."
=
"The hope is that if you give kids enough knowledge they will then be able to acquire new knowledge on their own"
Acquiring new knowledge on their own = learn.
I think phonics is a very useful tool, for what it is. My own anecdote is that my kids started with phonics on their path to learning to read. It’s basically step 1. Tough to read words if you have no tools for decoding and phonetically pronouncing them.
But FdB makes many crucial points. Being able to sound out words (just as I can sound out words in other languages which I don’t actually speak) is a necessary but insufficient step in comprehending what those words mean, or further downstream skills like composing and deciphering thoughts, concepts, and ideas using those words. And I’d be surprised if school systems didn’t already start with phonics in grade 1. If such school systems exist, they should definitely rectify that problem. This seems like the lowest hanging of fruit.
I do think this may be one area where FdB’s usual rebuttal about the overall usefulness of pedagogical tools in lifting all boats may not fully apply. If there are some students who are currently NOT receiving phonics training, that seems like a fixable problem to allow those cohorts to be brought up to age-appropriate speeds. But that still only gets them back to the starting block. It won’t change the fact that 50% of students will still score below the group median on ANY test of any skill. Some students by definition will still be left behind. But at least they might still have attained a higher absolute level of ability (even if remaining dismal relative to their peers) that allows them to better function later as adults.
There are few if no schools not giving phonics training.
"Tough to read words if you have no tools for decoding and phonetically pronouncing them."
This is there the weakness of the phonics zealots really shines through. Three cuing bad! They should sound out words!
But what if the kid sounded out the word and has no idea what it is? You'll three cue.
I agree. Like I said, phonics is necessary but insufficient for literacy and proficiency. If it’s not currently being universally taught, it should be. But my kids are well past school age so I have no idea what schools do now, least of all in Mississippi.
Also, I am not under any circumstances listening to that damn phonics song.
I learned to read via phonics in public school back in the 1960s. I recall a worksheet I had to complete for homework in 4th grade. One of the words was "bee-tle," Beetle! I exclaimed. That's a bug. "Correct" my mom said. But note that I was raised by married parents in a middle class home. My parents talked to me and read to me and had a college level vocabulary. So I knew what a beetle was before I ever saw the word in print.
In contrast if I had been born poor it's quite likely my parent(s) would merely have used the word "bug" for roaches, beetles, centipedes, etc. So if you don't know what a beetle is, the ability to sound it out is useless.
This ties in with Freddie's larger theme that IQ matters far more than any educational method in how well children learn. So we will continue to spend billions of dollars on various pedological schemes, hoping to change this inconvenient truth. The money is not really wasted though. Even if ineffective, spending vast sums on public education lets the lower classes know that at least government is trying. And this in itself helps lessen social discord.
If you had a low IQ it wouldn't matter how much your parents talked to you and read to you with their college level vocabulary. My parents had IQs just above and just below 100. I was reading at college level at 3rd grade.
There are other ways we could spend the money. Believe me when I say that low income schools do not see the money being spent in any way that matters to them, if they see it at all.
Well, I'd be interested to know where you think all the money poured into public education is going? Note that North Dakota tends to have high test scores despite relatively low per capita spending on education. Washington DC is just the opposite. This implies culture, rather than money is the biggest factor.
I never said money was a major factor. And ND doing well while DC does not implies something other than culture or money.
As a resident of ND, that is horrifying.
NAEP scores are hard to game, I think. But if you break down scores by race and percentile, it's hard to see any miraculous jump.
I completely agree with everything Freddie says about phonics and it's absolutely true that the push on MS is pure propaganda.
Just musing here from a theoretical phonologist, but I wonder whether there's a stronger connection between 'phonics' and the ability to spell correctly. I have anecdotal evidence that this is true, and, if so, wouldn't be THAT big a deal, but might be interesting.
Overall, I think the Mississippi Miracle is less about phonics and more about muscular state action (centered on phonics).
The big comparison here is between states that are acting as a single administrative unit, as Mississippi is, and those that let everyone do their own thing.
Apart from the specific changes, just getting everyone following one particular plan is likely to yield results, and that’s what we’re seeing here.
So yes, teachers everywhere use phonics; very few K-1 classrooms are completely phonics-free. But few states are coordinating their approach as tightly as the Southern Surge states.
I had my disillusionment moment about educational miracles a while back. In a college psychology class, I used to show an educational video to accompany my lecture on the role of expectations in academic performance. Note that I am a social psychologist, not an expert in education, but even then engagement was important, and it was a pretty interesting video, narrated by Andre Braugher (of Brooklyn 99).
The video itself focused on interventions to raise low expectations in teachers and students, and one of the segments touted dramatic improvement in a low performing school through teacher retraining and environmental changes to classrooms. After a few years, I decided to find out how the school was faring: well, turns out it was involved in a standardized testing scandal, maybe even had to close. Lesson learned.
This may seem tangential, but I think the “word callers” criticism can become more apparent if you observe trends in classically-trained musicians failing to improvise comfortably without skill development in that facility of communication. Many classical musicians are adept readers of sheet music who are capable of “decoding” what’s on their page to sound, but may fail to know what to do when asked to improvise a melodic phrase without knowing how to create such meaning using pitches themselves.
Phonics decoding is a component of language reading, learning and application, not a catch-all solution framework for how to do all of that.
The thing that impressed me the most in the recent pro-Mississippi Miracle piece, was not the discussion of phonics but MS's practice of holding students back a year at third grade if they had not demonstrated minimum competency. The article said that this had the effect of focusing the everyone - students, teachers and parents - on the problem and forcing them to address it on an individual basis. This seems sensible and logical and would seem to be a practice that should be considered elsewhere.