FINALLY, AS ILLITERACY GROWS, A RETURN TO PHONICS TO TEACH READING
By
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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Reading
scores across the country are now the lowest they have been in
decades. Tests given in the 2019-2020 school year declined four points
in a single year. The reason for this decline is that most school
systems have abandoned teaching children how to read through the use of
phonics—-sounding out the letters in each word. That may soon change.
New
York City will now require all elementary schools to adopt a
phonics-based reading program in the coming school year—-a potentially
seismic shift in how tens of thousands public school students are taught
to read. New York Mayor Eric Adams declared that, “We’re going to
start using a proven, phonics-based literary curriculum that’s proven to
help children read. This is our opportunity to really move the needle
on something that has been impactful for our children for a long time.”
City
officials said teachers will be required to implement one of the
education department’s recommended phonics-based curricula for
kindergarten through second-grade as part of the initiative. This shift
is a major change in approach as the department traditionally defers to
principals on curriculum choice, with widely varying results. Just
over half of students in grades 3-8 are proficient readers, according to
state tests.
In New
York, during the Bloomberg administration, then Chancellor Joel Klein
pushed schools to use a reading approach known as “balanced literacy,”
which has increasingly come under fire for failing to emphasize
systematic instruction on the relationship between sounds and letters.
Twenty years later, that system remains entrenched in many schools.
Balanced
literacy, once known as the “look and say” method” and as the “whole
language” method, focuses on having children read whole words rather
than sounding them out. In contrast, phonics teaches children to read
by focusing on the sounds that different letters and groups of letters
make. Even though research has long shown phonics to be the most
effective way to teach reading, the balanced literacy approach has been
surprisingly difficult to dislodge.
I
have been writing about this subject for many years. In a 1982 column,
titled “Why Johnny Can’t Read: the look-and-say method,” in which I
noted that the education establishment did not heed the warning
expressed by Rudolph Flesch twenty five years earlier in his book “Why
Johnny Can’t Read.” This was followed in 1981 by “Why Johnny Still
Can’t Read.” Schools have been turning out graduates who range from
being slow readers to illiterates.
Education
specialist Samuel Blumenfeld points out that the “look-say” method of
teaching reading “contradicted all of human history in which it had been
proven…that language, not image, is the chief instrument of both
learning and instruction. Only the deaf rely on image more than
language, and even they must master language to achieve any high degree
of learning.”
In fact,
the first “look-say” primer was developed by Thomas H.Gallaudet, the
founder of the Hartford Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. His Mother’s
Primer, first published in 1835, contains this in its first line:
“Frank had a dog; his name was Spot.” Blumenfeld points out that,
“Since deaf-mutes have no conception of a spoken language, they could
not learn a sound-symbol system of reading. Instead, they were taught
to read by way of a purely sight method consisting of pictures and whole
words.”
There were some
at the time, including Gallaudet, who thought that they could apply to
all children some of the techniques he used for the deaf. In 1836, the
Boston Primary School Committee decided to try Gallaudet’s primer on an
experimental basis. The experiment was a dismal failure, and the
schools quickly returned to the traditional phonics method of teaching.
Since
1911, there have been several hundred studies that have compared the
look-say approach with phonics programs. Not one study found the
look-say approach to be superior. Some time ago, Dr. Robert Dykstra,
professor of education at the University of Minnesota, reviewed 59
studies. Reporting in the journal Teaching Reading of his findings, he
said: “The evidence clearly demonstrates that children who receive
early intensive instruction in phonics develop superior word recognition
skills in the early stages of reading and tend to maintain their
superiority at least through third grade.”
Prof.
Diane Ravitch, author of “The Schools We Deserve,” cites government
research which shows that, “…children should begin with phonics , then
move as quickly as possible into stories that use their phonetic
knowledge.”
American
children have been cheated by those who have imposed the look-say method
of teaching reading upon us. The answer to our illiteracy problem is
not, as so many in our society tell us, the expenditure of huge new
amounts of money. We already spend more money on education than ever
before, and more than any other country in the world. The more we
spend, the more illiteracy we have. The reason is that we are not
teaching reading in the effective, time-tested manner—-through the use
of phonics.
In the last
days of Communism in the Soviet Union, the book “What Ivan Knows That
Johnny doesn’t” showed that Russian children of eight or nine, taught
phonetically, were several years ahead of ours in reading; that with a
vocabulary of 10,000 words and the ability to use a dictionary, they
then can read and enjoy the masterpieces of Russian literature, while
American children, limited to the painfully memorized contours of 1,500
words, have to struggle through textbooks described by the Reading
Reform Foundation as being of “incredible banality.” It referred to the
abandonment of phonics as “perverted pedagogy.”
It
is sad to see that the United States ranks 125th in the world in
literacy. Only 50% of U.S. adults performed at level 3 or above
compared to 72% in Japan and 63% in Finland. In 2000, a government
formed National Reading Panel released the findings of its exhaustive
examination of the research and declared that phonics instruction was
crucial to teaching young readers. By any standard, the look-say method
and whole language teaching has been declared a failure.
Congratulations to Mayor Eric Adams for moving New York City away from
this failed system. Hopefully, others will follow in NewYork’s
footsteps.