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The Best-Kept Secret in U.S. Education

It’s the best-kept secret in U.S. education. Poor black and brown children are just as capable of learning as rich white children are. This simple fact has been proved many times in various private schools, which can serve only a lucky few. If someone dares to prove it in a public school, which could then serve as an example for others, the educational system responds in a predictable way. First, there are accusations of cheating. Then, after it turns out that the accusations are unfounded, efforts are made to destroy the program that is responsible for the poor and minority children’s high achievement. The attempts to destroy the program sometimes start even before the program has made much progress. This pattern of unexpected success, false accusation, and suppression is common in schools that serve the underprivileged. In contrast, the schools that serve the children of the wealthy and powerful are expected and allowed to be excellent.
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Why Did the Educators in the U.S. Abandon Phonics?

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published a book titled Why Johnny Can’t Read, and What You Can Do About It. Flesch explained that the only sensible way to teach anyone to read English, or any alphabetic language, is to teach them the relationships between letters and sounds, then teach them how to combine those sounds into words. He called it intensive phonics. That’s the method that was used in Colonial America and was still being used on the European continent. That’s why the schoolchildren in Europe tended to be about two years ahead of American schoolchildren academically. Yes, it’s harder to learn to read English than to learn to read Spanish or German or French. Flesch explained that the British compensated by starting their reading instruction a year earlier than everyone else.

Flesch explained that all of the research—yes, every single study published up until that time—solidly supported the phonics approach. Not even one study provided any scientific support for the “look-and-say” method, which has also been called sight reading or whole word. Instead of teaching children how to sound out any word they encounter, the practitioners of the look-and-say method teach children to memorize whole words by shape, as if English words are like Chinese characters.

Unfortunately, children who are taught to read by memorizing whole words by shape tend to end up functionally illiterate or even dyslexic. Children can memorize only a limited number of word-shapes, and they might accidentally reverse the shapes, such as mistaking was for saw. Worse yet, familiar words often take on an unrecognizable shape if they are in cursive writing or set in all caps or even in a different typeface. Fortunately, even some children in a look-and-say classroom figure out on their own that English letters stand for sounds. They break the letter code on their own. I broke the code on my own when I was four years old, before I ever set foot in any classroom. Many children learn despite what goes on in their classrooms.

The look-and-say method is the basis for the “whole language” curriculum that California adopted in the late 1980s, with disastrous results. Even though the scientific evidence had shown since the 1920s that the look-and-say method was the cause of our epidemics of functional illiteracy and dyslexia, the prominent professors in the teachers’ colleges solidly supported look-and-say and used their influence to suppress phonics instruction. After Flesch’s book created a public outcry in the mid 1950s, the “experts” redoubled their efforts to suppress phonics and did what they could to destroy Flesch’s reputation.

Flesch warned his readers that the educational establishment’s refusal to let teachers use an effective method to teach children to read was “gradually destroying democracy in this country. It returns to the upper middle class the privileges that public education was supposed to distribute evenly among the people. The American dream is, essentially, equal opportunity through free public education for all. This dream is beginning to vanish in a country where the public schools are falling down on the job.”

Flesch was quick to point out, “Mind you, I am not accusing the reading ‘experts’ of wickedness or malice. I am not one of those people who call them un-American or left-wingers or Communist fellow travelers. All I am saying is that their theories are wrong and that the application of their theories has done untold harm to our younger generation.”

It was refreshing to see someone point out that we should evaluate a theory on its own merits. According to Robert’s Rules of Order, “It is not allowable to arraign the motives of a member, but the nature or consequences of a measure may be condemned in strong terms. It is not the man, but the measure, that is the subject of debate.” But it makes no sense whatever to imagine that the people who opposed phonics were left-wingers. The anti-phonics crusaders were, to use a phrase that became popular a few years later, the Establishment. They weren’t labor organizers or grassroots activists. The people who led the anti-phonics crusade were the ones getting the big royalty checks from the big publishing companies and who were depending on wealthy philanthropists for their jobs and for the funding for the colleges they ran. Thus, the faculty of the teachers’ colleges must have faced overwhelming temptation to serve their wealthy and powerful benefactors instead of following Flesch’s example of standing up for schoolchildren.

When people serve the upper middle class (i.e., the bourgeoisie) at the expense of the working class, they are being bourgeois, not left-wing. Left-wingers serve the working class at the expense of the upper classes. That’s what those words mean. Flesch certainly knew that. However, he was writing in the United States in the mid 1950s, and he must have realized that anti-Communist hysteria was making it impossible for many people to think about the real meaning of such words.

It makes no sense to imagine that the war against phonics was a Communist plot. In reality, Communists (and many people who have been inaccurately labeled as Communists) seem to love phonics. In the early 1960s, the Communist government of Cuba wiped out illiteracy in Cuba by using phonics to teach poor people to read. The democratically elected government of Brazil had a similar phonics-based literacy program in the early 1960s, until said government was overthrown in a U.S.-supported coup d’état, supposedly in the name of fighting Communism. In 1980, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua launched a highly effective literacy campaign based on phonics. The Reagan administration’s desire to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, again in the name of anti-Communism, led to the Iran-Contra Affair.

Webster's Blue-Backed Speller was used to teach reading and spelling.
Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller was used to teach reading and spelling.

Of course, Communists aren’t the only ones who love phonics. Phonics is as American as apple pie. The number two bestselling book in the U.S. in the 19th century was Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller. Webster created this phonics-based method for teaching reading and spelling because he wanted to create a truly American language for the newly independent United States. The United States achieved high literacy in the 19th century even though most households had at most two books: the Bible and Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller.
I admire Flesch for speaking out about phonics. He was absolutely right about the importance of phonics for reading instruction, and the people who opposed phonics teaching or who want to “balance” it with other methods were (and still are) absolutely wrong. There’s no “middle ground” on this issue. I particularly admire Flesch for speaking out in the political context of the mid 1950s. As a Jewish lawyer who fled Austria in 1938 when the Nazis took over, Flesch knew about political oppression from first-hand observation.

As a Jewish man who was involved in education in New York in the 1950s, Flesch must have known that many American Jews were being unfairly fired from their teaching jobs and blacklisted by anti-Semitic McCarthyites. Yet Flesch stood up for the children of the United States and published Why Johnny Can’t Read, and What You Can Do About It. Tragically, his warning went largely unheeded. In 1981, he published Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools, which showed that practically nothing had changed in the interim. In 1987, the state of California threw phonics out the window and implemented a “whole language” curriculum statewide. As a result, California’s children’s reading scores dropped to the third lowest in the United States, ahead of only Louisiana and Guam. This tragedy would never have happened if the people of California had listened to Rudolf Flesch and demanded that their schools use effective teaching methods.

Grammar As a Marker of Social Class

In this clip from the musical My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins asks, “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” Many well-meaning people oppose the teaching of grammar to children because they are afraid of reinforcing this kind of social prejudice:

Personally, I couldn’t care less whether people drop their aitches. Nor does it bother me when people say “I seen” instead of “I saw.” That sort of thing might mark one as being from a particular place or a particular social class, but it doesn’t actually impede communication. What bothers me is when people have such a poor grasp of the rules of English syntax that they can’t read anything written at above a fifth-grade level and can’t express themselves coherently in writing.Photo by manitou2121

What Does “Therefore” Mean?

Recently, I wrote something that was copyedited by a poorly trained editor. She caught a few typos, for which I was grateful. However, she introduced more errors than she fixed. The most infuriating thing she did was to add the word therefore inappropriately in several places. If I had more than three statements in a paragraph, she’d often stick in therefore at the beginning of the last statement, just as you’d put the word and before the last item in a list that you’ve written out in a sentence. I asked her why she kept adding therefore. She said it was “for flow.” I started to explain why the added therefores made no sense, but then I realized that I was not talking with a Vulcan. It is probably pointless to try to reason with someone who is so illogical that she does not understand what therefore means.
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Why So Many of Us Think That Ignorance Is Cute

Many people have been complaining that the educational system in the United States is failing. Yet whether you consider something to be a success or a failure depends on your point of view. After all, a basketball game is a success if your team wins and a failure if it loses. If you want the educational system to keep the majority of the voters not only ignorant but completely unashamed of their ignorance, maybe the system is succeeding beyond your wildest dreams.

When you watch the following footage, note how completely unashamed the interviewees are about their ignorance. Some of them actually think that it’s cute:

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Education for Some, But Not for All

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

—Woodrow Wilson, from an address to the New York City High School Teachers Association
Jan. 9th, 1909

The above quotation, from an Ivy League University president who went on to become the Governor of New Jersey and then the President of the United States, is simply shocking. Read it carefully and think about what it means. Whom did he mean by “we”? What kind of person would want “one class of persons” to have a liberal education and find it necessary for “a very much larger class” to “forgo the privileges” (i.e., be deprived of) of a liberal education? Why would it be necessary for “a very much larger class” to forgo the kind of education that is appropriate for free people, as opposed to slaves? Did the “we” to whom Wilson referred include the people whose children were “by necessity” being deprived? In this context, do you find it surprising that Wilson wasn’t particularly nice to African-Americans?

Here’s an open letter to President Wilson that W.E.B. Dubois published in The Crisis, which was the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Photo by Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library Archives

Should Children Learn to Read What the Writer Actually Wrote?

As a writer, I choose my words carefully. As an editor, I have helped many other writers choose their words carefully. So do I want readers to be able to read the exact words that were actually written? Of course I do! That seems like a stupid question. However, some prominent professors of education have taught that children should use “cues,” guesswork, and their own expectations to generate their own narrative, instead of reading the words that the writer actually wrote. I feel that unless the children are reading the words that were actually written, they are not really reading. No real communication from writer to reader is taking place.

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Is Your Child Really Reading, or Just Guessing?

Can your child really read? Or is your child simply guessing what words are on the page? There’s an easy way to find out. Just print out this Reading Competency Test from the National Right to Read Foundation: http://www.nrrf.org/readtest.html

Part I of the test consists of eight groups of simple sentences. The sentences in the first group are made up of words that follow the simplest phonetic rules: “The big red hen is mad.” The second group includes some words with consonant blends: “Bang went the black drum!” The final group includes some words that follow more difficult rules: “Phone for some bread and fruit for the child.” Part II consists of six paragraphs. The first one is simple, and each succeeding paragraph is more difficult.

To administer the test, print out two copies. Give one copy to the child, and have the child read each sentence. On your copy, make a check mark each time the child skips a word, substitutes a different word (even if it means the same thing), inserts an unrelated word, or mispronounces a word (remove the check mark if the child corrects the mispronunciation).

This test helps you figure out whether your child is really reading or is just guessing. There’s no picture of an angry red chicken to enable the child to guess what “The big red hen is mad” is supposed to mean. Unfortunately, many of our primary school teachers have actually been trained to teach children to look for clues of that kind instead of teaching children to sound out the words. How do those teachers expect children to comprehend what they read if the children can’t identify which words were actually written? As soon as those children start having to read real textbooks, instead of lavishly illustrated storybooks, they’ll be in big trouble.

According to the National Right to Read Foundation, a student who has completed second grade but cannot read all of the sentences in Part I with one check mark or less in each group needs to study phonics. Likewise, any child who cannot read independently at grade level needs to study phonics. I would also add that any children who are having trouble reading should also have their hearing and vision tested.

When children study phonics, they are specifically taught how the letters of the alphabet are used to represent sounds in words. Unless they understand phonics, they will have a lot of trouble in reading any alphabetic language. In 1998, the National Academy of Sciences published a report titled Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Its main conclusion was that “Adequate progress in learning to read English (or any alphabetic language) beyond the initial level depends on having a working understanding of how sounds are represented alphabetically.”

Tarzan Learns About Pronouns!

In this scene from the classic 1932 film, Tarzan the Ape Man, Tarzan gets confused by pronouns. A pronoun is a function word that stands in for another noun. Pronouns have no meaning of their own. They take their meaning from context. The first-person personal pronouns (I, me, myself) refer to the speaker. The second-person personal pronouns (you, yourself) refer to the person to whom the speaker is speaking. Tarzan has trouble with this concept, possibly because he was reared by chimpanzees and therefore failed to learn grammatical principles in any language before he went through puberty. Of course, Cheeta the chimpanzee would never be able to figure out pronouns at all. Chimpanzees have never been able to grasp any grammatical concept.

I tried to find some other footage of Tarzan and Jane dialog, but all I could find was this scene where Tarzan tears off Jane’s evening gown and tosses her in the water, whereupon the two of them do a lovely underwater ballet. This movie was made right before the Motion Picture Association of America started enforcing the Hays Code, which banned nudity.