I first came across the idea of fads within the education system upon reading Reginald Damerall’s book Education Smoking Gun. In it, Damerall details the total lack of scholarship in the education colleges, which leads to a vulnerability to faddishness in teaching. Teachers are led away from time tested teaching methods to methods that seem more exciting, more progressive, and less intellectual, in an effort to be more inclusive and make learning more fun. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the area of reading instruction.
Reading is a basic skill all children must learn if they are to be educated. It is ground zero for all other learning. If a child cannot read, he cannot learn history, grammar, logic, math, or any other subject. Reading is one of the most powerful tools we can give a child to empower them. And yet, the teaching of reading has been hijacked by one of the worst educational fads in recent decades.
Emily Hanford, in her new docuseries—Sold A Story—examines the issue of learning to read in the US and the educational fad that contributed to millions of children not learning to read. The fad goes by many names: Reading Recovery, Leveled Reading, and the Three Cueing System, and first came to the United States via a New Zealander named Marie Clay. Clay had studied children who were struggling readers and used her observations to adapt a reading program based on the strategies these children were using to try and read words. Her program—Reading Recovery—emphasizes how children learn in their own way, and teacher’s “teach” by observing their students and the processes by which they learn. The program requires one-on-one instruction with a highly-trained teacher and must be employed daily, lest the child fall behind. The main components are repetitiously reading to the child and writing as a reinforcement to reading. The child learns to “read” by memorizing the words, and extracting meaning from the text. Phonetic awareness is not emphasized and much of her program seems to focus on the need for a great deal of training and development for the teachers. These ideas about teaching reading came to the US in 1984 when Clay visited Ohio State University and trained several teachers there. As a result, Reading Recovery went on to be used in over 42 states as of 2018.
One of those trained in Ohio was a woman by the name of Gay Su Pinnell. Pinnell partnered with another woman named Irene Fountas who took these ideas and developed their own program using Leveled Books. The strategies are similar to those of Reading Recovery: reading to the child—called guided reading—and matching books to children based on their interests and reading level. The child “reads” the books. It’s unclear from their website how exactly the child learns to read other than being guided. The final method mentioned above—Three Cueing—is similar to the first in that the emphasis is on learning to read by making predictions about the words on the page using three “cues”: semantic (word meaning from sentence context), syntactic (grammatical features), and graphophonic (letters and sounds). But Emily Hanford points out that it’s this very strategy that has led to around a third of fourth graders unable to read at a basic level. There was also a great deal of focus in the above methods on the reading environment of the child. Classrooms all over were adapted to inspire children to read—with reading nooks, comfy chairs, and a multitude of books at their disposal. Hanford explains:
For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by—memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don’t know—are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don’t get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.
One thing I noticed as I listened to Hanford’s docuseries, as well as read about each of the above teaching methods, is the lack of emphasis on phonetic training in learning to read words. Children were instructed to guess, or somehow extrapolate what word they were looking at by looking at other words they had been taught to memorize by being read to repeatedly. This isn’t reading. There certainly is memorization in reading, but it comes after one learns to read the word. Words being committed to memory after they are phonetically understood is one of the components supported by the Science of Reading:
Phonics instruction teaches students the correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system. The science of reading research tells us that phonics instruction is necessary for all students and that effective phonics instruction should be systematic.
And yet, phonetic instruction is deemphasized in all three of the popular methods currently in use in most public schools.
The other aspect of reading instruction that had virtually no mention in the popular methods is spelling. Spelling is crucial for reading. Linda Schrock Taylor—who taught special education for 35 years and has written numerous articles and books on learning to read—points out what should be obvious,
The language of America—English, for those who have forgotten—is written in a CODE and the only way to learn how to read and write anything written in that CODE is to first learn how to SPELL. Musical performers and creators learn to read and write the Code in which music is written. Dancers and choreographers learn to read and write the Code in which movement can be recorded. Stenographers used to learn to read and write shorthand notation which also is a Code. When schools lost the teachers who understood the importance of, and how to teach spelling—real education came to a standstill. Schools no longer are capable of teaching students how to Encode, or how to Decode, the Code In Which English is Recorded.
Taylor makes a very good point, and it’s a point I apply in my own homeschooling efforts. The teaching of reading is intimately connected to spelling. My children learn to spell, write, and read as a single activity, with wonderful results.
Something that baffles me is how overly complicated Reading Recovery, Leveled Reading, and the Three Cueing Methods theories make learning to read appear to be. As I read over each theory’s methodology, I was inundated with jargon. Unless a child has a learning disability that complicates their efforts, learning to read is actually very simple.
In the 16 years I’ve been homeschooling, I’ve successfully taught reading to all of my children. Anyone can teach it, even a child. After I taught our first three children to read, our second born—inspired by her new skill—promptly went and taught her little brother during play time. When I sat down to assess him for beginning homeschooling, I found he’d already obtained this skill. They were only ages eight and four at the time.
The fact that teaching children to read is so easy and the fact that the education establishment—which claims a monopoly on the educating of the nation’s children—is using methods that make learning to read unnecessarily difficult is just one of many reasons parents across the nation have chosen to homeschool. But even non-homeschooling parents are alarmed at how big of a problem this is. Many parents interviewed in the aforementioned docuseries found out for the first time, during the pandemic, that their children were unable to read, and began asking uncomfortable questions. Reports from school had said everything was just fine according to the assessment materials based on the faulty methods. But it wasn’t fine. The realization that the education system they trusted to teach their kids had, in fact, failed them miserably was a wake-up call, and understandably produced anger and disillusionment. Some parents, as a consequence, even started to homeschool.
Even if you do not homeschool or do not plan to, even if you have never taught anything in your life, you can teach your child to read. Linda Schrock Taylor offers a number of resources to aid you in the process. She offers very concrete directions, which are simple and easy to incorporate into your daily routine. By making a small change, you will give your child the gift of reading, which will lay the foundation for all future education.
