If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.

As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.

So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!

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[–] [S] 6 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Please check out the investigative reporting by American Public Media, they document schools continuing to use it post-2020 and even some teachers talking about how their school district flat out said they’ll change the program description to comply with the law but not how they teach. If you think this isn’t happening anymore you’re really missing a story.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (4 children)

    I'm aware of this debate and the history, and cheered the reintroduction of mandating phonics instruction to New York Public Schools, one of the last holdouts in the country.

    So yes, I agree: research and common sense show that phonics-based instruction is a more effective way of teaching children how to read, compared to the long-discredited whole language movement.

    But I take issues with two ideas in your post: first, that this is an issue that affects a lot of people, and second, that this affects younger generations more than older generations.

    To the first point, I'm arguing that most people eventually learn how to read, regardless of what the formal district or state level curriculum says to use. Some combination of parents and caretakers and external learning materials (children's books, children's television, apps and toys, tutoring, external programs like the very popular hooked on phonics) are teaching them outside of school. Lots of teachers are giving individualized instruction and getting people past the hump, even if the district or state curriculum says to do things a particular way. Many kids enrolled in non-phonics curricula still get plenty of exposure to phonics instruction. New York being slowest to return to phonics contributed to this perception, in that New York's (and Columbia University's) outsized media/cultural influence led this conversation to be had decades after it was already settled in most of the rest of the English-speaking world.

    For the second point, your post makes it sound like this is something that young people today are encountering for the first time. No, these ideas stem from a centuries-old debate with non-phonics instruction peaking basically during my own childhood in the 80's. The backlash against whole language was going strong in the 90's, and culminated in the federal Department of Education coming down hard on the side of phonics during the GWB presidency. Most of the state and local educational systems got on board by then, too. And maybe the boomers that got the most concentrated version of Whole Language grew up to be slightly less literate than other generations. But whatever it is, there are so many other things affecting them today, too, to where "how they were taught to read in 1960" isn't going to be a factor distinguishable from plain old noise.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    Yeah, the investigative reporting I linked goes into literally everything you’re saying plus some showing that it’s still happening. I don’t have the time to recap hours and hours of investigative reporting. If you’re interested in further detail you can listen to it.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    No, I'm saying that what you're talking about doesn't actually link cause and effect. Curriculum selection is a small part of the educational challenges in this country (and in other countries), and many students come up short for all sorts of different reasons, from family/home issues, nutrition, poverty, truancy and attendance, instructional quality (regardless of what written curriculum the instructor should be teaching), etc.

    Meanwhile, some excellent students can thrive no matter what they're given. It's not like the kids attending the whole language schools grew up with like 0% literacy rates.

    So there are kids that were gonna learn to read well under either paradigm. And some that were gonna be bad readers under either.

    To pin the broad swath of reading issues on this narrow slice of curriculum design is overstating the effects of curriculum. That's what my original comment was getting at, and still what I believe. More details about curricula don't actually address my non-curriculum points: that you can't just argue with an idiot on the internet and conclude that the reason for his idiocy is because he must've been taught with the three cueing method. That's too much of an inferential leap.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    The idea that how you teach children something doesn’t affect how well they learn it is flat out stupid. Going ‘oh well some kids are better at learning this core skill than others so it doesn’t matter how you teach them, therefor it doesn’t matter how you teach anyone because some of them were just going to be bad at it no matter what’ is built on assumptions on top of assumptions. I don’t accept that some children are destined to be bad at reading, and I hope to god anyone teaching children doesn’t believe that. Even special ed teachers should be believing in the capabilities of their students.

    Literally everything you’re bringing up is addressed in the reporting I’ve linked you. You aren’t tellling me anything new. It doesn’t change that starting kids off on a poor foundation for understanding how to read is not going to magically turn them into readers. In fact, the very issues you bring up (wealth inequality) tie in to how this is disguised in rich peoples’ school districts by the fact that they can just afford tutors if their kid struggles. BTW, if you want people to focus on the non-curriculum aspects of teaching you should probably just say that instead of hinting around it and then implying someone is an idiot for not changing the subject.

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  • If A causes B, and you see B, it's a logical fallacy to presume that the B you observe was caused by A. That's the core of what I'm discussing here: pointing out that B is caused by more than just A, and that A itself isn't as common as you seem to suggest, so your Bayesian inference of how much B is caused by A is weighted all wrong.

    You came in, excited to share with the world about the reading debates, and then making the mistake of overassigning that cause to every effect you see. I'm pointing out the errors in your reasoning.

    I'm not discouraging you from being excited about the topic. It's important. I already agree with you. I also don't need hours of podcast audio to summarize what I already know from extensive reading on the topic, over literal decades. I'm not arguing with you about the history or the science.

    I am, however, asking you to, like, actually read and understand what I'm saying. You've leapt to an unsupported conclusion (the illiterate people I encounter are illiterate because they weren't taught phonics) based on a bad reasoning from a correct premise that I agree with (phonics instruction is the best method of teaching literacy, and too many educators went down the wrong path in the past). And separately, you seem to be under the misconception that people born in 2000 suffer from this problem worse than people born in 1980 or 1960. That's been my consistent position this entire thread.

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